INTERCAL is one of the oldest esoteric programming languages . It was created in 1972 by students Don Woods and James Lyon as a parody of existing programming languages and as “gymnastics for the mind”; according to the creators, its name means "programming language with an unpronounceable abbreviation" ( Eng. Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym ).
It differs fundamentally from academic and practical programming languages, many standard operations in it turn out to be nontrivial, for example, the simplest way to assign a value of 65536 to a variable is the construction: DO :1 <- #0$#256 . The authors have saturated the language with paradoxical operators such as , FORGET and even PLEASE ABSTAIN FROM CALCULATING (“ please refrain from computing ”). Even for characters special names were created, for example, quotation marks " and the equal sign = are called respectively" rabbit ears "and" half-lattice "(meaning half the # sign).
Despite all the exoticism, INTERCAL is Turing-complete , that is, you can express everything in it as in a regular programming language.
The paradoxical ideas of INTERCAL served as the ideological foundation for the creation of the even more sophisticated esoteric languages that followed it, such as Befunge , Brainfuck , Malbolge , Unlambda .