Explained far more throughly at http://pike.ida.liu.se/ than I can in an e-mail.
It really looks like an intriguing language, with a (supposedly) very fast runtime, (again, supposedly) beating Perl, Python, Tcl, and Java in execution times. Unfortunately I've been unable to get it to compile anything successfully after building the compiler, due to an error regarding a file (master.pike) that doesn't appear to even be in the source distribution.
