For some reason, not practical for sure, my 1968 edition of The SNOBOL4 Programming Language by Griswold, Poage & Polonsky is still sitting on my bookshelf. I confess I haven't used SNOBOL for anything since school. As I recall we wrote an assembler program in SNOBOL and had to correctly assemble and run a program the instructor had written.

Jon, You might want to consider GNU Common Lisp as well. GNU CLisp will run on most platforms including Windows and Linux so you'll have the same system in each environment. Also, it doesn't expire in 60 days. There is a nice music typesetting system, CMN - Common Music Notation that will run on either CLisp or Allegro CL 6.2 (ACL).

      - Mark