Icon was Ralph Griswold's next crack at a language after SNOBOL5. He was a prof at U of Arizona when I was there and one of his students was the teacher of a comparative languages course and he threw SNOBOL at us. I was a frosh and this was a 272 course, but comparing Pascal to LISP to APL to SNOBOL to CDC6400 assembler was awesome. Quite the brain-stretcher, it {SNOBOL} was all about pattern matching. Many functional and logic programming languages take elements from SNOBOL, as do RegEx engines.