SPITBOL (Speedy Implementation of SNOBOL) is a compiled implementation of the SNOBOL4

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

. Originally targeted for the

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applicati ...

and

System/370 The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a range of IBM mainframe computers announced as the successors to the IBM System/360, System/360 family on June 30, 1970. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migrati ...

family of computers, it has now been ported to most major microprocessors including the SPARC. It was created by Robert Dewar and Ken Belcher, who were then at the

Illinois Institute of Technology The Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Illinois Tech and IIT, is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the m ...

. Prior to the development of SPITBOL, SNOBOL4 was thought to be slow,

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...

-intensive, and impossible to compile due to its dynamic nature. While delayed binding prevents everything from being determined at compile time, SPITBOL adopts various strategies for making decisions as early as possible. Recent versions of the SPITBOL compiler are available. Since 2001 the source code for the original SPITBOL 360 compiler has been made available under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. MACRO SPITBOL is an implementation of SPITBOL written in the 1970s by Robert Dewar and Anthony P. McCann. MACRO SPITBOL is coded in MINIMAL, an assembly language for an abstract machine. The instruction set is carefully defined to allow some latitude in its implementation, so that hardware operations favorable to string processing can be exploited. An implementation of MINIMAL that was designed for interpretation on microcomputers was done by translating MINIMAL into MICRAL using a translator that was itself implemented in SPITBOL. The MICRAL version of MACRO SPITBOL, together with the MICRAL interpreter ran in under 40K bytes. This extreme object code compression of MICRAL is achieved using a set of machine code macro substitutions that minimizes the space required for the object code and macro table. The complexity of known algorithms for an optimal solution to this problem are high, but efficient heuristics attain near-optimal results. The source code for MACRO SPITBOL was released under the

on April 17, 2009.Macro Spitbol source
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Spitbol Compiler Compilers Pattern matching programming languages SNOBOL programming language family