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endymi0nyesterday at 7:34 PM1 replyview on HN

I had this funny moment when I realized we went full circle...

"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 it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL


Replies

basilgoharyesterday at 7:47 PM

Thank you for this. I somehow never heard of this. I thoroughly enjoyed reading that and the loss of sanity it resulted in,

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