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kvikkalkul

Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Kvikkalkul
     
         /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.
     
        {Home (http://prefect.com/home24/kvikkalkul/)}.
     
        (1998-11-14)
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