Kvikkalkul
<language> /kveek`kahl-kool'/ A deliberately cryptic programming language
said to have been devised by the Swedish Navy in the 1950s as part of their
abortive attempt at a nuclear weapons program. What little is known about it
comes from a series of an anonymous posts to Usenet in 1994. The poster
described the language, saying that he had programmed in Kvikkalkul when he
worked for the Swedish Navy in the 1950s. It is an open question whether the
posts were a troll, a subtle parody or truth stranger than fiction could ever
be.
Assuming it existed, Kvikkalkul is so much a bondage-and-discipline language
that it is, in its own ways, even more bizarre than the deliberate parody
language INTERCAL. Among its notable "features", all symbols in Kvikkalkul,
including variable names and program labels, can consist only of digits.
Operators consist entirely of the punctuation symbols (, ), -, and :. Kvikkalkul
allows no comments - they might not correspond with the code. Kvikkalkul's only
data type is the signed fixed-point fractional number, i.e. a number between
(but not including) -1 and 1. Dealings with the Real World that require numbers
outside that range are done with functions that notionally map that range to a
larger range (e.g., -16383 to -16383) and back. Kvikkalkul had a probabilistic
jump operator which, if given a negative probability, would act like a COME
FROM. This was, sadly, deleted in later versions of the language.
Home.
(1998-11-14)
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