The Intercal Programming Language Revised Reference Manual
THE INTERCAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE REVISED REFERENCE MANUAL Donald R. Woods and James M. Lyon C-INTERCAL revisions: Louis Howell and Eric S. Raymond Copyright (C) 1973 by Donald R. Woods and James M. Lyon Copyright (C) 1996 by Eric S. Raymond Redistribution encouragedunder GPL (This version distributed with C-INTERCAL 0.15) -1- 1. INTRODUCTION The names you are about to ignore are true. However, the story has been changed significantly.Any resemblance of the programming language portrayed here to other programming languages, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 1.1 Origin and Purpose The INTERCAL programming language was designed the morning of May 26, 1972 by Donald R. Woods and James M. Lyon, at Princeton University.Exactly when in the morning will become apparent in the course of this manual. Eighteen years later (give ortakeafew months) Eric S. Raymond perpetrated a UNIX-hosted INTERCAL compiler as a weekend hack. The C-INTERCAL implementation has since been maintained and extended by an international community of technomasochists, including Louis Howell, Steve Swales, Michael Ernst, and Brian Raiter. (There was evidently an Atari implementation sometime between these two; notes on it got appended to the INTERCAL-72 manual. The culprits have sensibly declined to identify themselves.) INTERCAL was inspired by one ambition: to have a compiler language which has nothing at all in common with anyother major language. By ’major’ was meant anything with which the authors were at all familiar,e.g., FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, ALGOL, SNOBOL, SPITBOL, FOCAL, SOLVE, TEACH, APL, LISP,and PL/I. For the most part, INTERCAL has remained true to this goal, sharing only the basic elements such as variables, arrays, and the ability to do I/O, and eschewing all conventional operations other than the assignment statement (FORTRAN "=").
[Show full text]