It was the original system programming language for the Tandem Computers CISC machines, which had no assembler.
[2] The design concept of TAL, an evolution of Hewlett-Packard's SPL, was intimately associated and optimized with a microprogrammed CISC instruction set.
Each TAL statement could easily compile into a sequence of instructions that manipulated data on a transient floating register stack.
However, its semantics are far more like C. It does not permit indefinite levels of procedure nesting, it does not pass complex structured arguments by value, and it does not strictly type most variable references.
Programming techniques are much like C using pointers to structures, occasional overlays, deliberate string handling and casts when appropriate.