kvikkalkul

Kvikkalkul

   <language> /kveek`kahl-kool'/ A deliberately cryptic
   programming language said to have been devised by the Swedish
   Navy in the 1950s as part of their abortive attempt at a
   nuclear weapons program.  What little is known about it comes
   from a series of an anonymous posts to {Usenet} in 1994.  The
   poster described the language, saying that he had programmed
   in Kvikkalkul when he worked for the Swedish Navy in the
   1950s.  It is an open question whether the posts were a
   {troll}, a subtle parody or truth stranger than fiction could
   ever be.

   Assuming it existed, Kvikkalkul is so much a
   {bondage-and-discipline language} that it is, in its own ways,
   even more bizarre than the deliberate parody language
   {INTERCAL}.  Among its notable "features", all symbols in
   Kvikkalkul, including variable names and program labels, can
   consist only of digits.  Operators consist entirely of the
   punctuation symbols (, ), -, and :.  Kvikkalkul allows no
   {comments} - they might not correspond with the code.
   Kvikkalkul's only data type is the signed fixed-point
   fractional number, i.e. a number between (but not including)
   -1 and 1.  Dealings with the {Real World} that require numbers
   outside that range are done with functions that notionally map
   that range to a larger range (e.g., -16383 to -16383) and
   back.  Kvikkalkul had a probabilistic jump operator which, if
   given a negative probability, would act like a {COME FROM}.
   This was, sadly, deleted in later versions of the language.

   (http://prefect.com/home24/kvikkalkul/).

   (1998-11-14)