Interview With Author of the First Spoof Language 102
An anonymous reader brings us Computerworld's interview with Don Woods, one of the creators of Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym (INTERCAL). INTERCAL and its documentation were created in 1972 as a parody of that era's languages and instruction manuals. Among other things, Woods had this to say:
"We designed the language without too much trouble. Writing the manual took a while, especially for things like the circuit diagrams we included as nonsensical illustrations. The compiler itself actually wasn't too much trouble, given that we weren't at all concerned with optimising the performance of either the compiler or the compiled code. I admit I'm surprised at its longevity. Some of the jokes in the original work feel rather dated at this point. It helps that the language provides a place where people can discuss oddball features missing from other languages, such as the 'COME FROM' statement and operators that work in base 3."
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the link:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Malbolge [voxelperfect.net]
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
Most people entirely miss the point of Brainfuck. It was never meant to be esoteric for the sake of it, or to "challenge and amuse programmers" as Wikipedia puts it.
It was designed to create a compiler as small as possible. The original AmigaOS compiler was 240 bytes in size. Even smaller compilers have been created by people who truly grasped the spirit of the language.
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
How did you guys miss Whitespace? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language) [wikipedia.org]
P ' ' (Score:5, Informative)
Most people entirely miss the point of Brainfuck. It was never meant to be esoteric for the sake of it, or to "challenge and amuse programmers" as Wikipedia puts it.
It was designed to create a compiler as small as possible.
That, and Brainfuck is a realization of P ' ' [wikipedia.org], the first imperative structured programming language ever to be proved Turing complete.
Re:Bah! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Informative)
The first IronINTERCAL project announced will be a MMOG version of a 43-Man Squeamish league.
Fail. The game was 43-Man Squamish.
I still remember the invocation of the coin toss: "Mi Tio esta Infermo pero la Carretera esta Verde!*" (Portugese grammar corrected for me by Giglermo Regades, an Argentinian auto mechanic of my acquaintance in 1966.
(*"My uncle is sick but the highway is green.")
Re:Bah! (Score:3, Informative)
Nonsense. Brainfuck is just a complicated but still pretty direct way of describing a Turing Machine. Brainfuck is interpreted in a single direction and the code is static. Intercal lets you use COME FROM statements (act like goto except you jump from the label to this line, in threaded intercal you can have multiple COME FROMs for one label and each spawns a thread), has ABSTAIN FROM that deactivates certain commands at runtime until reenabled, expects you to say PLEASE every so often (or it rejects your code as impolite), implements boolean operators as unary operators (i.e. they take one argument instead of two), had explanations for the various signs used for operators and why they changed between punchcard and ASCII encoding ( was replaced with $ to signify the increasing cost of software, the select operator is ? since that's the reaction most users have when they try to understand it) and the whole manual continued the joke perfectly, including nonsensical circuit diagrams and tonsils (Other manuals have appendices so they wanted to have a removable organ in their manual too). Oh and Intercal comes in versions that use the bases 3-7 too (not 8 since that's too standard).