If you are interested in pattern-matching languages but never learned SNOBOL, you might try the IDE by Rafal M. Sulejman.
If you are using linux, just make a few edits to the tksliderc file to flip the slash delimiters and set the path to your SNOBOL4. I also replaced the gvim entry with gedit but had to give an editor parameter of –new-window as it refused to add a tab to a running instance. A very handy feature is “Save Transcript” which for starters will save the hot-key guide when you first start the IDE.
If you like python or converge, you will be at home with the indenting. And there is SNOBOL for python in SnoPy.
I can only hope that someone extends the editor with XOTcl. SNOBOL patterns are also available for UNICON, one of the OOP variants of ICON, the language which evolved from the SNOBOL5 project.
It would appear that SNOBOL was the first language accidentally released as open-source (part of the story preserved in the Griswold papers here in MPLS at UMN.)
The story of SNOBOL and performance can be found by a google on SPITBOL over at duckduckgo.com
For another OOP-variant of ICON (this one with UNICODE) see the objecticon project ( a name choice as regrettable as ICON and UNICON as any web search will reveal.)
For a pythonic variant of ICON, see converge. For the latest on-going contribution of ICON to programming languages, see Fibers in Ruby 1.9
