A new programming language facility for symbol manipulation is described. String procedures may be declared and called in a standard ALGOL context. ALGOL procedures can in turn be called by string procedures so that numeric and symbolic processes may conveniently be programmed together. Concatenation and a variant of SNOBOL's pattern matching make up a set of primitive commands. These are assembled together into conditional expressions which are to be used to provide alternative computational patterns. Arrays of strings are processed using quantifiers. The class of things which may be assigned to an identifier can be restricted by a procedure expressed in the notation. The language facilities have been implemented in the ALGOL compiler for the Burroughs B5500.
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