[1] From: "S.A.Rae (Simon Rae)" <S.A.Rae@open.ac.uk> (32)
Subject: RE: 10.0555 early days of e-text?
[2] From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu> (30)
Subject: Snobol
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Date: 3 Jan 1997 17:06:53 +0000
From: "S.A.Rae (Simon Rae)" <S.A.Rae@open.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: 10.0555 early days of e-text?
Responding to Mavis Cournane <cournane@curia.ucc.ie> about the Early days of
electronic text ...
> I know that e-text has been around since the sixties, but what could be
> done with it? ie. how much could it be analysed, using what software etc?
A book that I was recently looking at might be of some help (in that it is now
- in computing terms - quite old having been published in 1980). 'A Guide to
Computer Applications in the Humanities' by Susan Hockey published by
Duckworth in 1980. ISBN 07156 13154 (Cloth), ISBN 07156 13103 (Paper) lists
many of the early applications of computing which were then contemporary but
which may now be too old-fashioned for today's books.
> I have heard some whispers about SNOBOL, perhaps someone could help me out
> and tell me what it was and how it worked?
Another book to try:
'Computer Programming for the Humanities in SNOBOL4' by Eric Johnson published
by Dakota State University Press. Prof. Johnson teaches a course (essentially
of the same name) via the Internet - I did it one year, earned 3 credits, and
learned enough about SNOBOL to wish for time and the facilities to do more
with it.
I also have a URL bookmarked in my browser that points to a source of
information about SNOBOL (or its SPITBOL variant):
http://lands.let.kun.nl/TSpublic/coppen/SNOBOL.html
and lastly, figure 4.2.2 in the book 'The Macro Implementation of SNOBOL4' by
Ralph E. Griswold (the creator of SNOBOL) is, to my eyes, one of the most
aesthetically pleasing diagrams that I know of (just to return to an earlier
topic of Humanist discussion!).
Cheers
Simon
_________________________________________________________________________
Simon Rae : S.A.RAE@OPEN.AC.UK
Academic Computing Service :
The Open University, Walton Hall : phone: (01908) 652413
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, United Kingdom : fax: (01908) 653744
The URL for the OU's WWW home page is : http://www.open.ac.uk/
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Date: Fri, 03 Jan 1997 08:00:56 -0500
From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu>
Subject: Snobol
Dear Willard,
I thought the following information might be of interest to members of
the list as well as Mavis Courname.
Mavis Cournane wrote:
> I know that e-text has been around since the sixties, but what could be
> done with it? ie. how much could it be analysed, using what software etc?
> I have heard some whispers about SNOBOL, perhaps someone could help me out
> and tell me what it was and how it worked?
The SNOBOL/SPITBOL languages were very rich pattern matching languages
that allow humanists to write simple
yet powerful text processing programs. The SNOBOL/SPITBOL bibliography
which I found at:
http://feustel.mixi.net/computer/spitbol/spitbol_bib.html may be
helpful. SNOBOL was succeeded by the ICON
programming language, also by Griswold, and is available free of charge.
For more information on ICON, see
its homepage http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/ .
Patrick
Patrick Durusau
Information Technology
Scholars Press
pdurusau@emory.edu
(from http://feustel.mixi.net/computer/spitbol/spitbol_bib.html)
Brief SNOBOL/SPITBOL Bibliography
Gimpel, Algorithms in SNOBOL4
Griswold & Griswold, SNOBOL4 Primer
Griswold, Poage, Polonsky, The SNOBOL4 Programming Language, 2nd Ed.
Hockey, SNOBOL Programming for the Humanities
Books and papers are available from Catspaw.
There is a free public domain version of Macro Snobol for Dos available
from the University of Arizona or from Catspaw for $10 + shipping.