COMIT was the first string processing language (compare

SNOBOL 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 Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a ...

, TRAC, and

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

), developed on the

IBM 700/7000 series The IBM 700/7000 series is a series of large-scale (Mainframe computer, mainframe) computer systems that were made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series includes several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s ...

computers by Victor Yngve, University of Chicago, and collaborators at MIT from 1957 to 1965. Yngve created the language for supporting computerized research in the field of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, and more specifically, the area of machine translation for

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

. The creation of COMIT led to the creation of

, which stand out apart from other programming languages of the era (during the 50s and 60s) for having patterns as first class data type. Bob Fabry, University of Chicago, was responsible for COMIT II on Compatible Time Sharing System.

References

* * * Sammet, J.E. "String and list processing languages", in ''Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals''. . Prentice-Hall. 1969. Text-oriented programming languages Pattern matching programming languages Programming languages created in 1957 {{prog-lang-stub