COMIT

COMIT is an early programming language for processing strings of symbols, developed from 1957 to 1965 on the IBM 700/7000 series computers. Victor Yngve of the University of Chicago created it, working with collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to support computerized research in linguistics and in particular machine translation for natural language processing. Wikipedia describes it as the first string processing language, placing it before SNOBOL, TRAC and Perl in the line of languages built to manipulate text. Its creation led to SNOBOL, which stood out among the languages of the 1950s and 1960s for treating patterns as a first class data type. Bob Fabry of the University of Chicago was responsible for COMIT II, the version that ran on the Compatible Time-Sharing System. COMIT matters to the history of computing as the point where text manipulation, driven by the needs of linguists rather than numerical analysts, became the purpose of a language design.