Macro SPITBOL for Linux V3.8.1 (June 2012)

Macro SPITBOL is an extremely high performance implementation of the SNOBOL4 language.

It is maintained by Dave Shields (dave dot shields dot github at gmail dot com).

Development versions, as well as other files of interest, can be found at github.com/daveshields/spitbol-linux.

Licensing

Macro SPITBOL is licensed with the GPLv3 (or later) license.

COPYING contains a copy of the GPLv3 license.

COPYING-SAVE-FILE describes licensing issues for a SPITBOL "save file."

COPYING-LOAD-MODULES describes licensing issues for a SPITBOL "load module."

Documentation

• The SNOBOL4 Programming Language by R. E. Griswold, J. F. Poage and I. P. Polonski.
• Macro SPITBOL: The High-Performance SNOBOL4 Language by Mark Emmer and Edward Quillen.

The SPITBOL project notes with sadness the death of Ed Quillen in June, 2012. To quote from Mark Emmer's Acknowledgments in the SPITBOL Manual:

Ed Quillen, local novelist, political columnist, and SNOBOL enthusiast, co-authored this manual. He combined various terse SPITBOL documents from other systems with Catspaw's SNOBOL4+ manual, while providing more complete explanations of some concepts. Any observed clarity is this manual is due to Ed, while the more opaque portions can be blamed on me.

You can learn more about Ed at Ed's web site and Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen dies at age 61 in his Salida home.

Known Problems and Limitations

Load modules don't work.

Building Macro SPITBOL

To see if spitbol is working:


$ ./spitbol demos/hi.spt

If this doesn't work, especially if you get a message about a file not being found, then do
$ ldd -v ./spitbol
to list out the libraries required by the spitbol executble. Then verify that they are installed on your system, installing any that are missing. TODO: say how to do this...

To build the system:
$ make clean
$ make
$ make install

This creates /usr/bin/spitbol.

This release was built with the help of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. You should be able to build it on most Linux distributions.

If you get a compile error due to missing include file /usr/include/bits/predef.h, then try
sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386.See Missing predefs.h.

You can also try
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch

If you get the message "No such file or directory" when you try to run ./spitbol or ./bootstrap-spitbol, then install libc6-dev-i386 as described above.

Resources

Mark Emmer's SNOBOL4 site: Snobol4.coM

Phil Bunde's SNOBOL site: Snobol4.org