CLC-INTERCAL Reference

Table of Contents

Introduction

CLC-INTERCAL was first released as an April fool joke on April 1st, 1999. The idea behind the release was to provide a new INTERCAL compiler which could be used as a test-bed for new language ideas, provided one could justify such ideas with the fundamental INTERCAL philosophy of "doing things differently".

Some features of C-INTERCAL or INTERCAL-72 were thought to be too "normal", so support for them was made optional. In the current version (1.-94.-2 at the time of writing), such optional features can be enabled by providing command-line options to the compiler tool (see the chapter about the command-line compiler tool), or by using the appropriate menus in the calculator (see the chapter about the INTERCAL calculator). The reference manual will indicate which features are optional and which option enables them. For example, CLC-INTERCAL has always considered NEXT to be an obsolete statement, being just a standard subroutine call, and one enables it by selecting the next option (or by using the ick compatibility mode, which automatically enables this option).

Other optional features are experimental language extensions, or else extensions which, it was felt, are above and beyond the call of insanity, for example the ability to use computed statement labels or the "COME FROM gerund" statement. See the chapter about compiler extensions and optional features.

Obtaining CLC-INTERCAL

The official sources for CLC-INTERCAL will be normally hosted on intercal.freeshell.org; there is normally a mirror using my ISP's servers, see the CLC-INTERCAL download page. A Debian package for CLC-INTERCAL is provided by Mark Brown, usually at the same time as the official sources, or very soon after. See the Debian package description for more details. Packages for other operating systems and/or distributions may be made available in future. Watch this space.