 <p>Created by Dr. Martin Porter, <a href="http://snowball.tartarus.org/index.php" rel="nofollow">Snowball</a> is a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. It was created partially to provide a canonical implementation of Porter's stemming algorithm, and partially to facilitate the creation of stemmers for languages other than English. </p> <p>A further aim of Porter's was to provide a way of creating and defining stemmers that could readily or automatically be translated into C, Java, or other programming languages. The Snowball compiler translates a Snowball script (a <code>.sbl</code> file) into either a thread-safe ANSI C program or a Java program. For ANSI C, each Snowball script produces a program file and corresponding header file (with <code>.c</code> and <code>.h</code> extensions). </p> <p>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_programming_language" rel="nofollow">name "Snowball"</a> is a tribute to the SNOBOL programming language. </p>