And since I'm on the topic of Icon anyway: there's also a successor language that's now being developed on Sourceforge. A book is also being created there through public collaboration, and the whole thing makes a very interesting impression. I think I'll keep an eye on it - an Icon implementation with a better class library would definitely be an alternative for me for many small projects. Icon itself suffered somewhat from a rather narrow library - for example, almost nothing in the TCP/IP area and only very rudimentary libraries for database connections and similar purposes compared to Python, Perl, or Ruby. Unicon could change that.
Icon, by the way, was something like a successor language to Snobol. Snobol in turn was the first attempt at a programming language designed for text manipulation - well before regular expressions or even Perl existed. It had a pretty bizarre syntax (or rather two of that sort), but a very endearing charm. One of the few languages I know where structured and clear programming was almost impossible.
Icon fixed many of Snobol's problems - especially, it had a quite decent syntax. And string processing in Icon wasn't a piggyback syntax, but was fully integrated into the language. Besides, Icon also had nice things like generators - which were then (in Python's 2.x versions) discovered by Python.