SPITBOL (Speedy Implementation of SNOBOL) is a

compiled In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

implementation of the

SNOBOL4 SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

. Originally targeted for the IBM

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...

and

System/370 The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a model range of IBM mainframe computers announced on June 30, 1970, as the successors to the System/360 family. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migration path f ...

family of computers, it has now been ported to most major microprocessors including the

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

. It was created by

Robert Dewar Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar (21 June 1945 – 30 June 2015) was an American computer scientist and educator. He helped to develop programming languages and compilers and was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open-source software. He wa ...

and Ken Belcher, who were then at the

Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...

. Prior to the development of SPITBOL, SNOBOL4 was thought to be slow,

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

-intensive, and impossible to compile due to its dynamic nature. While delayed binding prevents everything from being determined at compile time, SPITBOL adopts various strategies for making decisions as early as possible. Recent versions of the SPITBOL compiler are available. Since 2001 the source code for the original SPITBOL 360 compiler has been made available under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

. MACRO SPITBOL is an implementation of SPITBOL written in the 1970s by

and Anthony P. McCann. MACRO SPITBOL is coded in MINIMAL, an assembly language for an abstract machine. The instruction set is carefully defined to allow some latitude in its implementation, so that hardware operations favorable to string processing can be exploited. An implementation of MINIMAL that was designed for interpretation on microcomputers was done by translating MINIMAL into MICRAL using a translator that was itself implemented in SPITBOL. The MICRAL version of MACRO SPITBOL, together with the MICRAL interpreter ran in under 40K bytes. This extreme object code compression of MICRAL is achieved using a set of machine code macro substitutions that minimizes the space required for the object code and macro table. The complexity of known algorithms for an optimal solution to this problem are high, but efficient heuristics attain near-optimal results. The source code for MACRO SPITBOL was released under the

on April 17, 2009.Macro Spitbol source
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Spitbol Compiler Compilers Pattern matching programming languages SNOBOL programming language family