#Text database
5 messages in this thread
John,
Have you ever tried programming with SNOBOL/4? More specifically with SPITBOL
(a dialect of SNOBOL/4)? You can make data do all kinds of weird and wonderful
things with that language — I know people who have built reverse dictionaries
(words spelled backwards) using it, and other exotic stuff. It's not even very
difficult to learn. Linguists love it — nobody else seems to know what to do
with it, but it might be what you're looking for.
OTOH, what you actually may need is simply a full-text database. Folio has a
nice one, and there are lots of others around.
Kathy <<– The One-Off CD Shop MidSouth, Inc.
Kathy:
What a delight! I have heard anybody talking about SNOBOL and SPITBOL for
years! I did my undergraduate college research in these two, wrote parsing
programs, automated readability-scores, lots of fun stuff. I'd love to take a
shot at them again in the pc or Mac enviornment! Do you know of someone
selling compilers.interpreters?
Best – Rich
(This is embarrassing — you know more about it than I do. 😉
I seem to remember something about a SNOBOL/4 compiler for DOS… it was
several years ago, though. Maybe in Programmer's Shop? We ran ours at Manoa
on an old IBM mainframe. I think there is/was a newsgroup on inet once
(there's a newsgroup for everything else, why not?) There may even be a
freeware version available through FTP somewhere. I seem to remember hearing
about it, but never followed up on it. Sorry!
Welcome back, BTW.
Rich, Katherine,
You may want to try out the ICON progrmming language. It was developed
by Griswold & Griswold, who were the perpetrators of SNOBOL. ICON is supposed
to be a stand-alone language, but it has been implemented in C as a set of
macros. If you look in Programmer's Paradise, I am sure that you will find an
advertiser selling ICON as a C add-in.
Phil
Phil,
<<… the perpetrators of SNOBOL>> Love it! <g>
Might be worthwhile as a curiosity, but I don't really have much time these
days to learn another language. Nonetheless, I appreciate the referral!
Kathy