This is the INTERCAL Resources Page.

Just out! Now with internationalization, so the entire world can fall under its sinister spell, it's...INTERCAL 0.19!

Beware! If you aren't a hard-core hacker, you'd best surf right back where you came from now. Nothing but twisted technical yuks and an inexorable descent into brain-sucking obsession awaits beyond this point. You have been warned.

Abandon All Sanity, Ye Who Enter Here

So, you think you've seen it all, eh?

OK. You've coded in C. You've hacked in LISP. Fortran and BASIC hold no terrors for you. You write Emacs modes for fun. You eat assemblers for breakfast. You're fluent in half a dozen languages nobody but a handful of übergeeks have ever heard of. You grok TECO. Possibly you even know <shudder> COBOL.

Maybe you're ready for the ultimate challenge...INTERCAL.

INTERCAL. The language designed to be Turing-complete but as fundamentally unlike any existing language as possible. Expressions that look like line noise. Control constracts that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl. Data structures? We don't need no steenking data structures!

INTERCAL. Designed very early one May morning in 1972 by by two hackers who are still trying to live it down. Initially implemented on an IBM 360 running batch SPITBOL. Described by a manual that circulated for years after the short life of the first implementation, reducing strong men to tears (of laughter). Revived in 1990 by the C-INTERCAL compiler, and now the center of an international community of technomasochists.

INTERCAL. Now you, too, can be a part of the madness.

INTERCAL Resources

Documentation

You can download either a Postscript or flat text version of the Revised INTERCAL Manual here. Postscript is recommended, as the manual now includes figures and diagrams until recently unseen by any but the small handful with paper copies.

An INTERCAL paper

Alexander Garrett wrote a paper on INTERCAL for his Spring 1997 Programming Languages: Theory and Design class. Alexander writes:

The obvious choice was INTERCAL (I'm still quite surprised that I'm the only one who picked it -- most people did Java??). Anyway, it was not favourably received...when [the professor] handed it back, he said, "Ah. I see you're someone with a sense of humour. Unfortunately for you, I'm not."

We have corrected two typos (misspellings of "Malvernite" and "compiler") in this copy.

Implementations

You can download the latest version of the C-INTERCAL distribution here (includes the manual and sample programs). Requires either bison or yacc and flex or lex. Builds and runs nicely under any ANSI/POSIX platform, including Linux and the free BSD versions.

You can download a binary archive of William Walter Patterson's port of INTERCAL 0.15 for DOS, which finally has the programming language it truly deserves.

Other Tools

Jonathan Ferro has written an Intercal calculator mode for Emacs.

You can find out more about Kevin Stock's implementation of INTERCAL functions for PERL. Alexander Garrett has written a Java class implementing the INTERCAL math library.

Home Pages

Louis Howell, possibly the most accomplished C-INTERCAL hacker not yet permanently institutionalized, has his own INTERCAL page, The Pit.

Brian Raiter, who edited the revised version of the INTERCAL manual available in HTML above, maintains a good INTERCAL page.

Jacob Mandelson also has an INTERCAL Page.

(The code from all of these home pages has been folded into the INTERCAL distribution.)

Other Resources

There is an alt.lang.intercal Usenet newsgroup.

INTERCAL has even shown up once in the print media. Here's a transcript of an article by Charles Stross.,

Extension Proposals

There have been various proposals to extend INTERCAL to support various trendy modern programming concepts. Of these, perhaps the most impressively gaga is Malcolm Ryan's proposal for Threaded Intercal.

Andrew Arensburger is developing a proposal for operand overloading in INTERCAL.

The fine folks at Assurdo Technologies have released an INTERCAL implementation in Perl. One of them writes ``[We're] gearing up for a manifesto. Our goal is to position CLC-INTERCAL as the logical successor to Java. (After all, it's faster, more functional, and provides better job security for programmers!) But first we have to get the editor environment (TECO) sorted out, write an ORB, and provide some mechanism for generating XML (probably via custom obfuscated troff macros).''

Other Interesting Languages

Befunge -- Computer Programming in multiple Directions, Dimensions, and Topologies.
BrainF*** -- An 8-instruction Turing-complete computer language.
Malebolge -- Programming from Hell.