Now that this has been released maybe a whole new generation of people could come to enjoy this language as much as I have.

Many thanks to everyone involved.

Dave replies:

Pam,

Thanks for sharing the memories. I can almost place Pershing and Carlisle. I also have fond memories of WW JHS. My wife and I were there during a visit to ABQ in June. The only person in the building then was a fellow graduate of Bandelier, WW JDS and Highland! She is now a teacher there. What I found most interesting was the change in the neighborhood. I can recall riding my bike to WW across almost a half-mile or more of open road, especially one day in March when the winds were up and the tumbleweeds almost knocked me off my bike. The area is now completely developed. Moreover, it became one of the poorest neighborhoods in ABQ and has only started the process of gentrification. I also recall Winrock fondly, esp. seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” when it opened, at a time when Joe Abouzelman, former manager of the Hiland Theater, was the manager.

I don’t recall the names you mention save Miles Shore, which rings a small bell.

dave

My program does a “brute force” search, trying all possibilities, though it does have some code to limit guesses to boxes with more than two squares. It would be an interesting exercise to try to “explain” the logic as it goes along, though I don’t think it would provide much insight.

I am making progress, and hope to have a 32-bit 8-bit character version in a couple of weeks. I have spent a significant amount of time rewriting the existing translators to put them in a more accessible form. I hope to update the files at the sourceforge project sight shortly, once the code is in a consistent state. Help debugging will be appreciated. Watch this blog for details, as I will write a post when the code is published. Help with doing/testing 16-bit character version for Unicode would also be appreciated, but I need to get base version going first.

By the way, I am spending as much time on this as possible, which explains why there have been so few blog posts lately.

Dear Dave,

thank you for undertaking to port my beloved language to Linux. I hope you are making rapid progress. If I can help, I would like to do so. I have made some minor contributions to Phil Budne’s CSnobol (especially for the MS-DOS version). More than a decade ago, I produced a beta code interaction and analysis program for the beta code text and data files of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and other ancient textual material, using Mark Emmer’s SPITBOL386. The program involved much assembly language programming for sub routines (especially for screen graphics and speed), since I had decided to write the Greek characters to the screen in graphics mode. It is still widely used and runs smoothly under DOS emulation in a Linux environment.

If I could hold a Linux SPITBOl in my hands some day, it would be like the realization of a dream.

By the way: I learned the language at Oxford in the 80ies. My teacher was Susan Hockey. Other languages, in which I am sufficiently fluid to do serious productive work are C, C++, different kinds of assembly, Icon, Basic and Pascal. None of these comes as close to what I expect from a programming language as does SNOBOL4/SPITBOL. The more your undertaking is extremely welcome.

With kind regards

Burkhard Meissner

I love Linux, but it CAN be improved…

Funny, by excluding the GNU part, you’re further dividing the Free Software community by not showing respect to the founders of the movement and the huge, important took chain that exists within FLOSS systems.

http://tinyurl.com/no-ubuntu << Just my opinion on the matter.

I refuse to rally around Ubuntu because I think that it’s not an ongoing concern. Sure, Canonical was put in place to sponsor Ubuntu and create a profitable business out of it, but it has yet to make a single dollar of profit, or break even for that matter. It’s a matter of time before Shuttleworth decides that it’s no longer viable for him to sink millions behind what is, essentially, a broken distribution model. I also don’t believe its even close to being one of the best distros out there.

FWIW, I wholly believe in the comments Adam Williamson has made about Ubuntu and it’s business model. It’s neither a top tier Linux developer on the same level as Slackware, Debian, Mandriva, Fedora, or OpenSuse, nor is even a good citizen to the Linux community. To read more about Adam Williamson’s POV on Ubuntu, see here:

http://www.happyassassin.net/2008/10/28/why-i-dont-like-canonical/

I’ve said it before: If my choice in distros was limited to Ubuntu, I’d probably be using a Mac.