Home Table of Contents News Blogs Opinion Research Practice Contributed Articles Review Articles Careers Archive Videos About Communications
Sign In
advertisement

Home → Magazine Archive → June 1972 (Vol. 15, No. 6) → Blocks—a new datatype for SNOBOL4 → Abstract

Blocks—a new datatype for SNOBOL4

By James F. Gimpel

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15 No. 6, Pages 438-447
10.1145/361405.361410

A new datatype, called a block, has been implemented for SNOBOL4. A block is a three-dimensional aggregate of characters in the form of a right parallelepiped, best thought of as a three-dimensional extension to a string. (The third dimension is used for overstriking.) Blocks may be printed, concatenated in any of three dimensions, and merged on the basis of program-defined connection points. Some blocks adapt in size and shape to their environment. Blocks and their operations are mainly used for composing printable output. A variety of graphical problems (including flowcharting, bargraphs, logic diagrams, mathematical-equation formation, and text justification and preparation) have been programmed on a printer in what appears to be an easy and natural way. In addition to these somewhat specialized applications, blocks appear to be a good general purpose device-independent output formation mechanism especially suitable for nonnumerical work. The concept of a block is largely language independent. That is, blocks require little in the way of specialized syntax and could readily be absorbed into the external structure of most programming languages.

The full text of this article is premium content

0 Comments

No entries found