SPITBOL is a compiled implementation of SNOBOL4. (SPITBOL is an acronym for speedy implementation of SNOBOL.) The original version was written for the IBMSystem/360 and System/370. It was created by Robert Dewar and Ken Belcher at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented symBOlic Language) is a computer programming language that was developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph E. Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) (NYSE: IBM) (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ... The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a computer system family announced by International Business Machines on April 7, 1964. ... The System/370 is a model range of IBM mainframes introduced in the early 1970s as the successors to the System/360 family. ... Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private Ph. ...
Until SPITBOL came along, SNOBOL4 was thought to be (1) slow, (2) a memory hog, and (3) impossible to compile due to its dynamic nature. While the delayed binding prevented everything from being determined at compile time, SPITBOL was very clever about doing as much as possible as early as possible. SNOBOL programs run under SPITBOL were indeed amazingly fast. Notable was the SPITBOL garbage collector which ran with almost no spare memory.
A significant contribution of SPITBOL to computer science was to demonstrate the clear distinction between a language and its implementation. To say that a language is slow is to reveal a lack of imagination. It's better to say that writing a fast implementation is hard. This same issue arises now with reference to Java, which is often erroneously called an interpreted language. Of course, it's the common implementation that is an interpreter. The language is just the language. Wikibooks has more about this subject: Programming:Java Java is an object-oriented programming language developed initially by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems. ...
Modern versions of the SPITBOL compiler can still be found and since 2001, the source code for the original SPITBOL 360 compiler has been made available under the GPL licence. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
Until SPITBOL came along, SNOBOL4 was thought to be (1) slow, (2) a memory hog, and (3) impossible to compile due to its dynamic nature.
A contribution of SPITBOL to computer science was to demonstrate the clear distinction between a language and its implementation.
Modern versions of the SPITBOL compiler can still be found and since 2001, the source code for the original SPITBOL 360 compiler has been made available under the GPL licence.
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