MAKE_DECISION GT(PerlSpeedAndUtility,SPITBOLSpeedAndUtility)     : S(U
+SE_PERL),F(USE_SPITBOL)
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Wow, I hadn't thought of SNOBOL in years. I had to look up how to write that.

I'm not sure what the answer is as to which would be better for your needs, but surely it's easy to write a few simple micro-benchmark programs in both and compare the speeds?

As a way of learning SPITBOL, maybe you should take the simplest piece of SPITBOL currently in use and try to reimplement it in perl. That would also give you a useful "application-level" benchmark more suited to your organization...