Snowball programming language

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For other uses, see Snowball (disambiguation).

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.