Miscommunications of the ACM

Language No One Asked For Ships Update No One Needed

INTERCAL, the programming language designed in 1972 to have nothing in common with any other language, has received its biggest update in over 25 years. The update, which no one requested, includes 64-bit arithmetic, a complete system library implemented in pure INTERCAL, a VS Code debugger, and a formal mathematical proof that the language's most ridiculous feature is computationally necessary.

"We proved that COME FROM isn't just a joke — it's the only way to write loops that actually work," said the project's author, who requested anonymity but was identified through git blame. "Dijkstra would have hated this. That's how we know it's correct."

The update, designated INTERCAL-64, extends the language from 16-bit to 64-bit precision and includes implementations of the Knight's Tour, Hilbert curve geographic indexing, and the Gale-Shapley stable matching algorithm — problems previously assumed to be beyond INTERCAL's capabilities, and which many argue should have remained so.

The system library provides addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division at 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit widths. All routines are implemented in pure INTERCAL. "We could have just called the C# math library," the author acknowledged. "But that would have been convenient, and convenience has never been a design goal."

DO .1 <- #7
DO .2 <- #6
DO (1040) NEXT
DO READ OUT :3
PLEASE GIVE UP

The above program multiplies 7 by 6. It requires a system library, a subroutine call, and a politeness check.

Perhaps most controversially, the release includes a VS Code debugger — the first interactive debugger ever built for INTERCAL in over fifty years of the language's existence. The debugger features breakpoints, stepping, watch expressions, and an "AI assistant" that is actually a collection of insults embedded in the source code.

When asked why anyone would build a debugger for a language designed to be impossible to understand, the author responded: "Have you tried stepping through a COME FROM loop? It's like watching a horror movie. You can see where the control flow is going and there's nothing you can do about it."

The accompanying paper, "COME FROM Considered Helpful," proves via TLA+ model checking that INTERCAL-72's NEXT/RESUME control flow cannot express callable subroutines containing loops longer than 79 iterations. The practical consequence is that bubble sort is limited to arrays of 13 elements. The COME FROM statement, widely regarded as INTERCAL's most absurd feature, is the only mechanism that overcomes this limitation.

"We submitted it to SIGBOVIK," the author confirmed. "It felt like the right venue."

The update also introduces 17 tutorial programs designed to be stepped through in the debugger, a comprehensive idiom guide, and a Discord server that, at press time, had more documentation than members.

Development was assisted by Claude, an AI system developed by Anthropic, which contributed to the formal proofs, the Knight's Tour implementation, and the discovery that INTERCAL's mingle operator is identical to the Morton code algorithm used in production geospatial databases. When reached for comment, Claude stated: "I wish to remain anonymous."