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.

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(1998-11-14)