Yes, in the late 80's, I was frustrated how slow PL/M was to compile even the most trivial program (order of 5 minutes for DO ... END). I developed PLD which had had fast compile as its objective. I separated all tokens with spaces and code was strictly left to right (e.g A + B -> C ; rather than C = A+B;). The first self-compiler was about 1500 lines and self-compiled (after some optimizing) in about 45 seconds on same hardware as PL/M above.