资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

INTERCAL
     
         /in't*r-kal/ (Said by the authors to stand
        for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym").
     
        Possibly the most elaborate and long-lived joke in the history
        of programming languages.  It was designed on 1972-05-26 by
        Don Woods and Jim Lyons at Princeton University.
     
        INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer
        languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written
        language, being totally unspeakable.  The INTERCAL Reference
        Manual, describing features of horrifying uniqueness, became
        an underground classic.  An excerpt will make the style of the
        language clear:
     
        It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person
        whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem.  For
        example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a
        value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:
     
            DO :1 <- #0$#256
     
        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}.
     
        Eric S. Raymond  wrote C-INTERCAL in
        1990 as a break from editing _The_New_Hacker's_Dictionary_,
        adding to it the first implementation of {COME FROM} under its
        own name.  The compiler has since been maintained and extended
        by an international community of technomasochists and is
        consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity.
     
        The version 0.9 distribution includes the compiler, extensive
        documentation and a program library.  C-INTERCAL is actually
        an INTERCAL-to-C source translator which then calls the local
        {C} compiler to generate a binary.  The code is thus quite
        portable.
     
        {Intercal Resource Page
        (http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/intercal/)}.
     
        {Usenet} newsgroup: {news:alt.lang.intercal}.
     
        ["The INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual", Donald
        R. Woods & James M. Lyon].
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (1997-04-09)