1. SNOBOL StriNg Oriented SymBOlic Language
Special purpose language for string manipulation and handling
Invented in 1962 at the Bell Labs
Farber, Griswold, and Polensky
It was created out of the frustrations of working with the languages of the that time because they required the developers to write large programs to do a single operation

2. Application
It was used to do  most of the work in designing new software and interpreting different language grammars 
Toward the end of the eighties, newer languages were created which could also be used for string manipulation
They include the  PERL and AWK languages. Unlike SNOBOL, Perl and Awk use regular expressions to perform the string operations
Today, roughly forty years after its release, the language is rarely used!

3. Simple Data Types Integers and Strings Integers; positive or negative
Illegal: ,076
Reals; originally not allowed (e.g 13.4)
Strings
Maximum length of a string is 5,000 characters

4. Simple Operators Unary vs. Binary Assignment Operator-6
4 - 1
more on it later
Assignment Operator =
Arithmetic Operators
* / **
Parentheses

5. Variables
The name of a variable must begin with an upper or lower case letter
The language is ‘case insensitive’
If it is more than one character long, the remaining characters may be any combination of letters, numbers, or the characters ‘.’ (period) and ‘_’ (underscore)
The name may not be longer than the maximum length of a line (120 characters)

6. Variables Examples: Illegal WAGER wager P23 VerbClause SUM.OF.SQUARES

7. Snobol Statement Structure
Label Statement body :GOTOField
Label
Must begin in the first character position of a statement
Must start with a letter or a number

8. Snobol Statement Structure
The GOTO Field
:(label)
:S(label)
:F(label)
:S(label1) F(label2)

9. Types of Statements
Assignment
Pattern Matching
Replacement
End

10. Assignment Statement variable = value v = 5 w.1 = v w = 14 + 3 * -2
Spaces around arithmetic operators are necessary
No Spaces; Unary operator!

11. Strings
v = ‘Dog’
v = “Cat’s”
NULL =