The humble programmer

Many languages, including Fortran, and machines such as most minicomputers have little or no built-in character manipulation capability and yet are often required to process character information. This paper discusses the programming of character ...

Spitbol, the compiler version of the symbol manipulation language Snobol 4, is compared with the well-known higher-level languages of Cobol, Fortran and PL-I. An algorithm for searching and insertion into a binary tree was chosen for a comparison ...