Here's the specific software being talked about:<p>> 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.<p>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:<p><a href="http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/" rel="nofollow">http://www.snobol4.org/csnobol4/curr/</a><p>Release 2.0 is from January 1, 2015.<p>He maintains a website with lots more information about SNOBOL and relatives:<p><a href="http://www.snobol4.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.snobol4.org/index.html</a>
Ah, SNOBOL. I learned in a class, apparently because the instructor had written a book on it. The good news was that the book was out of print, and so he provided photocopies. The better news was that it prepared me to encounter awk and Perl.
He's got the right idea. I think if people want to leave a legacy, open source projects are the way to go. github and wikimedia really facilitate that.<p>The content could survive longer than the pyramids if human civilization makes it that long.
SNOBOL's BREAK and SPAN matching operators provide the inspiration for the names of functions in the <string.h> library of ISO C.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849340" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849340</a>
SNOBOL is a really interesting domain specific language. You might never use it, but knowing a little bit about it will certainly broaden your thought processes. I'm glad somebody is trying to keep it alive.