INTERCAL
<language, humour> /in't*r-kal/ (Said by the authors to stand for
"Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym").
Possibly the most elaborate and long-lived joke in the history of programming
languages. It was designed on 1972-05-26 by Don Woods and Jim Lyons at Princeton
University.
INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways
but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. The
INTERCAL Reference Manual, describing features of horrifying uniqueness, became
an underground classic. An excerpt will make the style of the language clear:
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is
incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that
the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:
DO :1 <- #0$#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is
indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be
made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would
of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are
wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating
for the programmer having been correct.
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more
unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at
least several) people at Princeton.
Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> wrote C-INTERCAL in 1990 as a
break from editing _The_New_Hacker's_Dictionary_, adding to it the first
implementation of COME FROM under its own name. The compiler has since been
maintained and extended by an international community of technomasochists and is
consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity.
The version 0.9 distribution includes the compiler, extensive documentation and
a program library. C-INTERCAL is actually an INTERCAL-to-C source translator
which then calls the local C compiler to generate a binary. The code is thus
quite portable.
Intercal Resource Page.
Usenet newsgroup: alt.lang.intercal.
["The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual", Donald R. Woods & James
M. Lyon].
[Jargon File]
(1997-04-09)
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