Influences

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Languages

Ada
Fortress
Today (2007-01-16) I discovered Fortress. Happy, because it's a language with units, unicode operators, design by contract, and more (I still have to read the pdf), sad because of identical reason...
Assembler
C
C doesn't do anything for you, unless you ask for it. This is both C's main weakness and main strength. C also never tries to be forbid a programmer to do something; it might nag a bit, but in the end it will comply.

A programmer is the boss
No unexpected resource usage

Perl
Strings, regular expressions, and hashes make any text processing much easier. "There is more than one way to do it", is a gift most of the times and a crime in some cases. The lack of function prototyping and the fact that everything is a scalar can be a major stumbling block.

Strings are first class objects/vars
Index with non-integers

PL/I
Python
Documentation in source code
Immutibility support
Ruby

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