STOICAL is vastly different from its predecessors. Primarily because so much has changed since the decades ago that they were developed. Today STOICAL is powerful and general enough to be used as a high performance replacement for semi-compiled and interpreted languages like Perl, Python, SED and Awk. And because of STOICAL's advanced support for networking and concurrent threads of execution, it can be used to write efficient long-running servers and daemons that would normally need to be written in C. The intent here is not to explore the intricacies of archaic systems, but to create a new and modern language, well suited to the world as it exists today. STOICAL might therefore be more accurately represented by the recursive acronym SINS, SINS Is Not STOIC, but this word has a remarkable stigma attached to it ;-)