INTERCAL

/int@rkal/ , 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.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An
extended version, implemented in (what else?) Perl and adding
object-oriented features, is rumored to exist. See also Befunge.