[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:
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.