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INTERCAL /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 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
(http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/intercal/)}.
{Usenet} newsgroup: {news:alt.lang.intercal}.
["The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual", Donald
R. Woods & James M. Lyon].
[{Jargon File}]
(1997-04-09)
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