sexi

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sexi - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  String Oriented Symbolic Language
  SEXI
  SNOBOL
  String EXpression Interpreter
  
     <language> (SNOBOL) A string processing language for text
     and formula manipulation, developed by David J. Farber, Ralph E.
     Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky at Bell Labs in 1962.
  
     SNOBOL had only simple control structures but provided a
     rich string-matching formalism of power comparable to regular expressions
      but implemented differently.  People used it
     for simple natural language processing analysis tasks well
     into the 1980s.  Since then, Perl has come into favour for
     such tasks.
  
     SNOBOL was originally called "SEXI" - String EXpression
     Interpreter.  In spite of the suggestive name, SNOBOL is not
     related to COBOL.  Farber said the name SNOBOL was largely
     contrived at the time the original JACM article was published
     when one of the implementors said something like, "This
     program doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ...".  The
     expansion to "String Oriented Symbolic Language" was contrived
     later.
  
     Implementations include (in no particular order): SNOBOL2,
     SNOBOL3, SNOBOL4, FASBOL, SITBOL, MAINBOL, SPITBOL
     and vanilla.
  
     See also EZ, Poplar, SIL and Icon.
  
     SNOBOL 4 (http://snobol4.org/).
  
     David Farber (http://cis.upenn.edu/%7Efarber/).
  
     Ralph Griswold (http://cs.arizona.edu/people/ralph/).
  
     ["SNOBOL, A String Manipulating Language", R. Griswold et al,
     J ACM 11(1):21, Jan 1964].
  
     (2004-04-29)