Snowball programming language
Encyclopedia
Snowball is a small string-handling programming language
whose name was chosen as a tribute to the SNOBOL programming language, with which it shares the concept of string patterns delivering signals that are used to control the flow of the program.
The creator of Snowball, Dr. Martin Porter
, " toyed with the idea of calling it ‘strippergram’", because it "effectively provides a ‘suffix STRIPPER GRAMmar’" (see the homepage). In an amusing coincidence, the SNOBOL programming language was originally named SEXI - String EXpression Interpreter.
The basic datatypes handled by Snowball are strings of characters, signed integers, and boolean truth values, or more simply strings, integers and booleans. Snowball's characters are either 8-bit wide, or 16-bit, depending on the mode of use. In particular, both 8-bit ASCII
and 16-bit Unicode
are supported.
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
whose name was chosen as a tribute to the SNOBOL programming language, with which it shares the concept of string patterns delivering signals that are used to control the flow of the program.
The creator of Snowball, Dr. Martin Porter
Martin Porter
This article is about Dr. Martin F. Porter the inventor of the Porter Stemmer and the Snowball programming framework, for Martin Porter the musician, see Martin Porter Dr. Martin F...
, " toyed with the idea of calling it ‘strippergram’", because it "effectively provides a ‘suffix STRIPPER GRAMmar’" (see the homepage). In an amusing coincidence, the SNOBOL programming language was originally named SEXI - String EXpression Interpreter.
The basic datatypes handled by Snowball are strings of characters, signed integers, and boolean truth values, or more simply strings, integers and booleans. Snowball's characters are either 8-bit wide, or 16-bit, depending on the mode of use. In particular, both 8-bit ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
and 16-bit Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
are supported.