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[alt.lang.intercal] Re: Why does intercal exist?
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From: Jered J Floyd <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.lang.intercal
Subject: Re: Why does intercal exist?
Date: 27 Aug 1997 14:24:16 -0400
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
> I've read through some of the intercal manual, and understand at
> present this language currently exists to be a kind of example.
Actually, several INTERCAL implementations enjoy broad usage throughout
the telecommunications and computer-aided navigation industries. The
C-INTERCAL compiler that is freely available is similar to the GNU
compilers...a free publicly-available implementation of a common standard.
You probably haven't heard of the commercial INTERCAL compilers
available today because they enjoy a rather vertical market. However,
if you call Borland, Watcom, or Microsoft and inquire about their
INTERCAL products, I'm sure they'd be happy to send you the literature
that they have. If the service representative you first speak to
isn't familiar with the language, this is probably due to the relatively
limited market for INTERCAL products. Ask to talk to a supervisor,
they should be able to help you find what you are looking for.
> If it was intended as a tool, I was hoping somebody would know what
> purpose would be served by intercal's eccentric operators.
> Specifically, what good is 'interleave' or 'select'? Nor do I glean
> the value of *unary* AND, OR, or XOR operators. Is there any field of
> mathmatics or engineering where these functions would actually come in
> handy?
These are common worries of INTERCAL novices. As I mention above,
however, INTERCAL enjoys wide use in the telecommuncations industry.
In fact, AT&T (now Lucent) uses INTERCAL to control many of their
communication switches. The 5ESS electronic switching system has a
system entirely coded in INTERCAL. This helps to explain the somewhat
esoteric operators that the language has. The select operation proves
to be extremely usefull when attempting to keep track of the status of
banks of line cards. In fact, when AT&T switched from assembly coding
for these switches to INTERCAL, they found similar system performance
while cutting down on the programmer error rate nearly tenfold!
Computer-aided navigation also benefits from INTERCALs odd operators.
One little known fact is that the Mars Pathfinder rover had large
sections of its programming written in INTERCAL. INTERCAL, much
like Ada, is not heard of often in the popular press but it used
extensively throughout the government due to this flexibility and
fitness for use. With the advent of in-dash navigation modules in
cars, such as those offered by many rental agencies today, INTERCAL
will finally be delivered into a consumer environment.
As you might imagine, the market for well-trained INTERCAL programmers
is booming, and there is a significant undersupply. Even an INTERCAL
programmer with as few as 3 years of experience can easily command
a 6-digit salary. My advice to you is to spend several months getting
familiar with the limited C-INTERCAL implemetation, and then move up
to one of the more sophisticated products I've mentioned above.
Jered Floyd
MIT - INTERCAL Studies Department
[email protected]
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