AMBIT is a historical
programming language that was introduced by Carlos Christensen in 1964 for
symbolic computation. The language was influenced by
ALGOL 60 and is an early example of a
pattern matching language for manipulation of
strings (a more popular example from the same time is
SNOBOL). The acronym AMBIT stands for "Algebraic Manipulation by Identity Translation", but has also claimed "Acronym May Be Ignored Totally". AMBIT had dialects for manipulation of
lists (AMBIT-L) and
graphs (AMBIT-G) Both pioneered with
data structure diagrams and
visual programming as data and patterns were used to be represented by directed-graph diagrams. AMBIT/L was implemented for a
PDP-10 computer and used to implement the interactive algebraic manipulation system IAM.
