INTERCAL

2 definitions found

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  INTERCAL /in't*r-kal/ n. [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.tuxedo.org/~esr/intercal/'. An extended version, implemented
     in (what else?) {Perl} and adding object-oriented features, is available
     at `http://dd-sh.assurdo.com/INTERCAL'. See also {Befunge}.
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  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)