I love SNOBOL4/SPITBOL. It was a completely bizarre and original language that was quite powerful.
In the late 70s, I took two compiler courses with RBK Dewar, one of the creators of SPITBOL. Those courses were wonderful. He mentioned SPITBOL occasionally, and I remember one story in particular. The implementation was done in assembler, (if I'm remembering correctly), and it took 20 runs to get a working system, (I guess that means a basic suite of tests running successfully). That style of working is completely alien today, and arguably less effective.
Dewar also spent some time talking about his work on the SETL language (for processing sets). Flow analysis for global optimization could be expressed extremely concisely, and was of course applied to SETL itself.
That's the language the first Ada compiler was written in. Anyone knowing about the rough history of Ada compiler already has a reason to look at the language that got the job done. ;)
I took some undergrad courses with Prof Dewar in the 90s and all he talked about was Ada and Assembly (using an assembler he wrote). Never heard of SPITBOL. His class was great.
Forgot to mention it in my original comment, but in the grad-level compiler course, we actually wrote a compiler in SPITBOL. I don't remember if the language choice was optional or mandatory, but I did enjoy it.
In the late 70s, I took two compiler courses with RBK Dewar, one of the creators of SPITBOL. Those courses were wonderful. He mentioned SPITBOL occasionally, and I remember one story in particular. The implementation was done in assembler, (if I'm remembering correctly), and it took 20 runs to get a working system, (I guess that means a basic suite of tests running successfully). That style of working is completely alien today, and arguably less effective.
Dewar also spent some time talking about his work on the SETL language (for processing sets). Flow analysis for global optimization could be expressed extremely concisely, and was of course applied to SETL itself.