cross-posted from: https://gekinzuku.com/post/188827
INTERCAL is an esoteric programming language which was purposely designed to be confusing and not visually aesthetic. It has two maintained implementations in C-INTERCAL and CLC-INTERCAL. C-INTERCAL's compiler is invoked by the
ickcommand, and CLC-INTERCAL's compiler is invoked by thesickcommand.Some highlights of INTERCAL include
- Programmers must use
PLEASEbefore statements to avoid compile errors due to being insufficiently polite, but not too manyPLEASEstatements or the compiler will report errors due to being overly polite.- Every call to a random number generator will introduce a random chance of the code failing to compile and report
E774 RANDOM COMPILER BUG, and this chance to fail increases with the number of random number generator calls.- If compiling in INTERCAL-72 mode, the compiler will report
E111 COMMUNIST PLOT DETECTEDif the programmer uses features that are newer than INTERCAL-72.The full list of compiler errors and warnings for C-INTERCAL, as well as related documentation, can be found in the intercal/doc/ick.txi file under the "Errors and Warnings" chapter. If you want to quickly scroll through them, each of the entries are preceded by an
@ieanchortag.
