gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (12/15/86)
In article <9785@sri-spam.istc.sri.com> brunner@sri-spam.UUCP (Thomas Eric Brunner) writes: >... snobol seems to have passed from the keen of some unix vendors. The "sno" traditionally shipped with UNIX implemented Snobol-3; real Snobol afficionados probably prefer Snobol-4. "Sno" still existed as of 4.3BSD and UNIX System V Release 2.0.
ma_jpb@bath63.ux63.bath.ac.uk (Bennett) (12/19/86)
There is a compiled version of SNOBOL-4 called SPITBOL. This was originally developed by Robert Dewar, I believe at Illinois. At the time this gave a ten-fold performance improvement over existing versions of SNOBOL-4. Since then a number of minor enhancements have been made to SPITBOL, and a new version brought out called Macro-SPITBOL. This is written in a "Univeral" assembly code, with the intention that it should be macro expanded to the machine code of a target machine. It requires a very simple operating system interface to be written. My experience of writing a translator from scratch, and an operating system interface in a high level language is very favourable. The translator took one week, the operating system interface 4 hours and debugging two days. I used the approach of making the translated image look like a compiled high level procedure image, and linking it in to a high level system with all the operating system routines. The target architecture was a Motorola MC 68000. The Macro-SPTIBOL system was jointly developed by Dewar and Tony McCann of Leeds University, England. It can be obtained from: Dr. A.P. McCann, Dept. of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, ENGLAND Tel: +44 532 431751 I believe Version 4.3 is now available. J.P. Bennett University of Bath School of Mathematical Sciences Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY England Tel: +44 225 826826