SCAN was a conversational programming language available in the 1970s for text analysis. It was specific to text processing and could be used divide a text into sentences or words or split on separators. It was capable of running counts on a text, printing particular sentences, checking whether a particular word has occured, matching word-patterns or finding alliterations.
Comments
More information on SCAN and its use within the humanities can be found in the following:
Brown, P.J. \"SCAN: A Simple Conversational Programming Language for Text Analysis.\" Computers and the Humanities 6.4 (1972): 223-227. Web.
Brown, P.J. SCAN - A Sub-System for Document Searching. Computing Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1971. Web.