Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth.
is interview, Computerworld ventures down a less serious path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL.
The A-Z of Programming Languages: INTERCAL
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I really feel guilty that I never heard of this language! Googling shows it’s really nice, it could be the next best thing since sliced ruby!
But seriously, reading about such funny language is good way to start a day here in Europe!
I love esoteric programming languages. I got into them through Brainf–k ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainf–k ) and quite enjoy seaking out and testing some of the more humours of the esolangs. My favourite (thus far) would be Chef ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_(programming_language) ):
Hello World Souffle.
Ingredients.
72 g haricot beans
101 eggs
108 g lard
111 cups oil
32 zucchinis
119 ml water
114 g red salmon
100 g dijon mustard
33 potatoes
Method.
Put potatoes into the mixing bowl.
Put dijon mustard into the mixing bowl.
Put lard into the mixing bowl.
Put red salmon into the mixing bowl.
Put oil into the mixing bowl.
Put water into the mixing bowl.
Put zucchinis into the mixing bowl.
Put oil into the mixing bowl.
Put lard into the mixing bowl.
Put lard into the mixing bowl.
Put eggs into the mixing bowl.
Put haricot beans into the mixing bowl.
Liquefy contents of the mixing bowl.
Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Serves 1.
One of the most interesting ‘feature’ of INTERCAL is the “COME FROM [linenumber]” statement, that replaces the usual “GOTO [linenumber]”.
With that, you can break the execution flow with no visible delimiter, tracing program execution can be plain horrible.
An early experiment of exceptions 😉