[said by the authors to stand for Compiler Language With No
Pronounceable Acronym] A computer language designed by Don Woods and
James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other
computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written
language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL
Reference Manual 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. The language has
been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently
enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an
alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ... appreciation
of the language on Usenet.
Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version, implemented
in (what else?) {Perl} and adding object-oriented features, is
rumored to exist. See also {Befunge}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {ADVENT}{ASCII}{Befunge}{COME FROM}{hacker humor}{line noise}{retrocomputing}{write-only language}]