My favorite weird language is SNOBOL. It is a dynamic language with utterly alien syntax. In some ways, the syntax is even more minimal than that of Lisp. It ha

My favorite weird language is SNOBOL. It is a dynamic language with utterly alien syntax. In some ways, the syntax is even more minimal than that of Lisp. It has very unusual control flow: each statement can succeed or fail, and at the end of a line you may specify a label to goto on success, on failure, both, or neither. Embedded within this language is an incredibly powerful string pattern matching facility, which predated regex popularity. I think regex is probably as expressive, but I find SNOBOL more comprehensible. One of my favorite books from the late 70s/early 80s was the SNOBOL book by Griswold, Poage and Polonsky: http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/snobol-4-programming-language-automatic-computation_andrew-clues/713447 http://www.thriftbooks.com/w/snobol-4-programming-language-a.... Short, clear, and a great user guide and reference to this bizarre language. I rank it with K&R as one of the great programming language books. (Or maybe nostalgia is getting the better of me.) I took two compiler courses from R. B. K. Dewar, who was on the team that built the SPITBOL implementation of SNOBOL for IBM mainframes, a really fantastic set of courses from a great teacher. He talked about implementing SPITBOL, in the days when you could get maybe one run a day from the mainframe. By being exceedingly thoughtful and careful, they got the compiler implemented and running in twenty compile/debug cycles.