Details
INTERCAL was intended to be completely different from all other computer languages. Common operations in other languages have cryptic and redundant syntax in INTERCAL. From the INTERCAL Reference Manual:
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 <- #0ยข#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 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 features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.
Despite the language's intentionally obtuse and wordy syntax, INTERCAL is nevertheless Turing-complete: given enough memory, INTERCAL can solve any problem that a Universal Turing machine can solve. Most implementations of INTERCAL do this very slowly, however. A Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark, computing all prime numbers less than 65536, was tested on a Sun SPARCstation 1. In C, it took less than half a second; the same program in INTERCAL took over seventeen hours.
According to the INTERCAL manual, "the aim in designing INTERCAL was to have no precedents", supposedly neither in flow control features, nor in data manipulation operators. The designers were relatively successful; however, one known precedent is a machine instruction in a Soviet mainframe computer BESM-6, released in 1967, that is effectively equivalent to INTERCAL's "select" operator.
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