Interview With Author of the First Spoof Language

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."

A widely accepted use of COME FROM

[tepples]

If you hunker down and squint at it the right way, COME FROM is really an early form of aspect oriented programming

Even before the alleged fad that is AOP, processors have had hardware support for COME FROM for a long time. It's called a breakpoint [wikipedia.org].

Re:Bah!

[ari_j]

Whitespace allows other characters. They just don't have syntactic meaning. :P

Re:Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is essentially the spirit of wikipedia: people write what seems to be right, instead of bothering to research the issue and find out what actually is right.