Here's the specific software being talked about: > SPITBOL is, Shields says, a "quick and dirty" implementation of a 60s programming language called SNOBOL4, w

Here's the specific software being talked about: > SPITBOL is, Shields says, a "quick and dirty" implementation of a 60s programming language called SNOBOL4, written by Robert Dewar. It's terse and to the point—28,000 lines of code altogether, half of which are comments—and is chiefly meant to manipulate text and symbols, and recognize patterns. While SNOBOL4 was seen at the time as powerful but slow, SPITBOL was built for speed. Another implementation of SNOBOL4 which I'm familiar with which has also been maintained and made freely available under a simple permissive license is Phil Bunde's CSNOBOL4, based on the Macro SNOBOL4 from Bell Labs: http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/ http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/ Release 2.0 is from January 1, 2015. He maintains a website with lots more information about SNOBOL and relatives: http://www.snobol4.org/index.html http://www.snobol4.org/index.html