From the Preface (p. vii):
Edmund Fuller has described hearing an interview in which Edward R. Murrow asked Mickey Spillane how he could bring himself to pander to the public taste by writing the kind of books he did: Spillane's luminous reply, according to Fuller, was: "I write the kind of books I want to read and can't find."

We, with much the same motivation, have written this description of Snobol4, a computer programming language for the humanities. Our own training and interest is in the study of language and literature, and so the examples and exercises are directed particularly toward the machine manipulation of linguistic data and literary texts. Even so, the description should be useful to students of many disciplines, since the first part of each chapter presents features of the language in a generalized way, and the particular examples in the second part of each chapter have been chosen to exhibit principles and techniques which can easily be applied to verbal or symbolic data in a wide range of humanistic and social science applications.

This presentation of Snobol4 is particularly designed for members of the University of California community who have no previous knowledge of computers or computer programming. It describes a dialect of the language for Control Data Corporation 6000 series machines, implemented at the Berkeley Computer Center by Paul McJones and Charles Simonyi; Mr. McJones has reviewed our work as it has progressed, and has made many helpful suggestions.