This was a system used for some text adventure games made by Trillium/Telarium in the mid 80s.
AFAIK, no one has reverse engineered the virtual machine it used nor are there any surviving examples of the source for a game using it. While many other systems have been decoded, notably those used by Infocom and Sierra in the same era, this system remains unknown.
I've focused on the game Nine Princes in Amber, as it was the only one I had as a child, and haven't looked into the similarities and differences between it an the other SAL games.
Common for the era, whatever language the games was written in was "compiled" into a program that ran on a virtual CPU, or sequencer. It's not really much like a real CPU, there are no loops, and more like I would call a sequencer. It runs a series of mid to high level instructions with branches and jumps.
I have reverse engineered a great deal of how it works, see Detailed information about SAL sequencer
The "scenes" of the game can be decoded with the decode.py program. It will
print out a disassembly of the code. It's annotate with source location of
jumps, words assigned to token ID when making comparisons, automatically follows
goto chains, etc.
The program img-convert.py will convert the CGA format images into modern
image files (e.g., PNGs). I've only bothered to decode this image format, other
systems (C64, etc.) used different formats.
Information about how this games works, e.g. specific variables used for game state and the details of the fencing game.