The second programming language I became proficient in was SNOBOL4 which stood for “StriNg Oriented symBOLic Language” or something similar, a bad case of mangling a name to come up with a cool acronym. SNOBOL4 was a really cool language. It is a string manipulation language with a very powerful pattern representation datatype and pattern matching which is quite a more powerful and easier to use than regular expression such as are used in Perl and grep. Snobol had tables. Tables were like arrays but the “subscript” was a character string instead of an integer. (Called hashes in some other languages). It was an interpreted language implemented as a macro processor and could sometimes be rather slow. Later a true compiler called SPITBOL which stood for ‘SPeedy ImplemenTation of SnoBOL” another name mangled to get a cool acronym. Spitbol produced quite speedy programs. Snobol inspire several follow ons, SNOCONE was a preprocessor for C that implemented Snobol. An implementation of Snobol patterns in Python called SnoPyl. The developer of Snobol, Ralph Griswold went on to implement another language Icon Icon never enjoyed the same degree of usage as Snobol probably because while it implemented a number of improvements over Snobol (more modern control structures for example), it implemented a different pattern string manipulation system. This pattern implementation may have had theoretical advantages over that of Snobol, but in practice it never became as wide spread as that of Snobol. I remember seeing recruiting ads for the NSA looking for CS majors/programmers with knowledge of Snobol, thinking about it Snobol would certainly be a natural to use for some aspects of code breaking.