The first string-handling and pattern-matching language, designed in 1957-8 fOR applications in natural language translation. The user has a wORkspace ORganised into shelves. Strings are made of constituents (wORds), accessed by subscript. A program is a set of rules, each of which has a pattern, a replacement and goto another rule. ["COMIT Programmer' s Reference Manual", V.H. Yngve, MIT Press 1961]. [Sammet 1969, pp. 416-436]. (1994-11-30)