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.tuxedo.org/~esr/intercal/.
An extended version, implemented in (what else?) Perl and adding object-oriented features, is
available at http://dd-sh.assurdo.com/INTERCAL.
See also Befunge.
Node:interesting, Next:Internet, Previous:INTERCAL, Up:=
I =
interesting adj.
In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of
`annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge,
and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient
Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Oppose trivial, uninteresting.