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(SNOBOL) A string processing language for textand formula manipulation, developed by David J. Farber, Ralph E.Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky at Bell Labs in 1962.SNOBOL had only simple control structures but provided arich string-matching formalism of power comparable to regularexpressions but implemented differently. People used itfor simple natural language processing analysis tasks wellinto the 1980s. Since then, Perl has come into favour forsuch tasks.SNOBOL was originally called "SEXI" - String EXpressionInterpreter. In spite of the suggestive name, SNOBOL is notrelated to COBOL. Farber said the name SNOBOL was largelycontrived at the time the original JACM article was publishedwhen one of the implementors said something like, "Thisprogram doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ...". Theexpansion to "String Oriented Symbolic Language" was contrivedlater.Implementations include (in no particular order): SNOBOL2,SNOBOL3, SNOBOL4, FASBOL, SITBOL, MAINBOL, SPITBOLand vanilla.See also EZ, Poplar, SIL and Icon.SNOBOL 4 (http://snobol4.org/).David Farber (http://cis.upenn.edu/%7Efarber/).Ralph Griswold (http://cs.arizona.edu/people/ralph/).["SNOBOL, A String Manipulating Language", R. Griswold et al,J ACM 11(1):21, Jan 1964].