This paper is concerned with the design of hardware algorithms for nonnumeric computation. The subset of nonnumeric operations considered is derived from string processing languages such as SNOBOL or high-level data base languages used in data base management architectures. It is shown that cellular hardware can be designed to perform these operations on-line while the data is accessed from a rotating secondary storage medium. Being uniformly structured, the hardware could be implemented using LSI technology yielding an estimated pattern matching rate of about 100 million characters/sec. The proposed nonnumeric processor will find applications in the environment of parallel (or associative) data base management architecture, processing of large unstructured textual files, as a stand-alone microprocessor in digital communications which need simple search and update operations, or as a nonnumeric CPU that can be used along with the conventional CPU to expedite string processing operations.