When I was in college, I did a little bit of work in a language called SNOBOL. The entire language, while cool, is one big WTF.

It has the weirdest syntax I've ever seen. Instead of GoTo, you use :(label). And who needs if's when you have :S(label) (goto label on success/true) and :F(label) (goto label on failure/false) and you use those functions on the line checking some condition or reading a file. So the statement:

H = INPUT :F(end)

will read the next line from a file or the console and will go to the label "end" if the read fails (because EOF is reached or any other reason).

Then there is the $ sign operator. That will use the value in a variable as a variable name. So:

ANIMAL = 'DOG' DOG = 'BARK' output = $ANIMAL

will put the value 'BARK' on teh console. And because that isn't weird enough:

$DOG = 'SOUND'

will create variable named BARK (see the value assigned to DOG above) and give it a value of 'SOUND'.

The more you look at it, the worse it gets. The best statement I ever found about SNOBOL (from link text) is "the power of the language and its rather idiomatic control flow features make SNOBOL4 code almost impossible to read and understand after writing it. "