IBM 1401 assembler or maybe machine code before I actually had access to one. One interesting project was a 2 line (just could not get it down to one line) APL function to look up a keyword in a table of the form keyword space value and return the value.

I have read the thread but nobody says whether they are getting these performances on a 32 or 64 bit platform. Wouldn't this potentially make some difference. ... and be interesting.

I cant see where he said that so I will reply here. Shouldn't that be two sticks? It is not intended as a serious comment.

No. PL/I is the language. Look how far it got.