Does it still exist? Well it must! I haven't seen a SPITBOL reference in close on 20 years.

The reference to a 10 fold speed increase may refer to the comparison of SNOBOL4 and SPITBOL-360 on IBM-360 series mainframes. When SPITBOL came out it was supposed to be 10 times faster than SNOBOL4.

The comaprison with Perl will be very application sensitive, SPITBOL was renowned in the 70's for its implementation of regular expressions, but in those days there was really nothing to compare it to. For pure text processing SPITBOL may in fact be faster than Perl, but for anyhting else I think it will be so grossly lacking in features these days that Perl, or pretty much anything else, would leave it way behind.

jdtoronto