From bloom-picayune!mintaka!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!lll-winken!grover.llnl.gov!howell Fri Aug 16 07:27:27 EDT 1991 Article: 145 of alt.lang.intercal Path: bloom-picayune!mintaka!think.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!lll-winken!grover.llnl.gov!howell From: howell@grover.llnl.gov (Louis Howell) Newsgroups: alt.lang.intercal Subject: Re: (creeeak) The door opens. . . . Message-ID: <104149@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> Date: 12 Aug 91 17:53:38 GMT References: <1991Aug11.200703.32643@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lines: 36 Nntp-Posting-Host: grover.llnl.gov In article , aecolley@unix1.tcd.ie (Adrian Colley) writes: |> Good point. That was the first article in alt.lang.intercal |> I've ever seen. |> Does anyone out there actually know anything about intercal ? Intercal was created by Donald Woods and James Lyon in 1973. Eric Raymond later wrote a compiler for it using C as an intermediate language, but I don't think he's interested in playing with it anymore. There is an ftp site, ftp.white.toronto.edu (128.100.2.160), from which you can get the manual and the compiler (in pub/intercal/intercal0.6.tar.Z). The current lunatic-in-charge and maintainer of the archive is Steve Swales (steve@bat.lle.rochester.edu). |> ... what it is ? It's a language designed to be as perverse as possible. Makes TECO look elegant and well-structured. Read the manual, it'll have you in hysterics. The last burst of conversation we had here was back around the beginning of the year. I wrote a couple of Intercal programs (Life, bubble sort) just to prove it could be done, and did some work on the compiler to implement arrays and fix a couple of other problems. I promised to send Steve my revisions when they were finished, but in March my wife had the horrible timing to have a baby a few weeks early and I never got it done. I may get around to polishing my stuff up and passing it on either this month or the next, particularly if there is any interest. In the meantime the older version should still be available from the ftp site. Christian Brunschen (d89cb@efd.lth.se) has also written a specification for an Intercal Machine Language, which I don't believe is part of the archive. -- Louis Howell (nazgul@llnl.gov)