<p><strong>Program Overview</strong></p> <p>L.D. Burnard described CLOC as \"a general purpose text analysis package in the tradition of COCOA, JEUDEMO or OCP\" (Burnard 259).</p> <p>CLOC was written in Algol 68-R, available only on ICL 1900 series mainframes, with its development future uncertain at the time of Burnard's review (Burnard 260). CLOC \"operated by first transforming the input text into what is essentially a large symbol table held on direct access backing store. This transformation is necessarily costly and highly machine specific\" (260). Burnard reported that it was faster than comparable programs like OCP at producing a concordance of the same short (500 word) text, remained faster for processing saved files, but was slower processing large texts (5000 words) from raw files (260).</p> <p>It was the first of its type to have a \"comparatively simple user interface\", which Burnard attributes to its intended audience of linguists rather than computer programmers (Burnard 259). It used a simple command language to generate concordances and indexes from text in any language, and required users to define individual characters as letters, padding, separators or to be ignored, with 'read as space' defined as a special category of separators (259).</p> <p>Burnard found that there were significant limitations to how characters could be defined. For example, CLOC could not equate characters like 'a' and 'A' for sorting purposes, padding characters defaulted to non-sorting, and certain parts of a text could be selected for processing by means of delimiters or its position (259). Those limitations aside, CLOC was notable for permitting texts to be saved in its internal format for later, repeated processing - a feature many contemporary programs of its type lacked (259). Users could select words and phrases for analysis based on frequency or pattern, such as all five-letter words ending in T (259).</p> <p>Burnard was particularly pleased with CLOC's notably clear manual and simple command language (259). He noted that the command language had a few irritating idiosyncrasies, but judged these as minor quibbles given the program has been successfully used by humanities grad students with minimal trouble (Burnard 260).</p> <p><strong>Source</strong></p> <p>Burnard, L.D. \"Software Review: CLOC.\" <em>Computers and the Humanities</em> 14.4 (1980): 259-260. <a href=\"http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02404435\" target=\"_blank\">Web</a>.</p>