NEW IN THIS RELEASE Release 0.17 (by Eric S. Raymond) 27 Feb 1998 Incorporates a minor bug fix by Jeff Uphoff . Release 0.16 (by Brian Raiter and Eric S. Raymond) 26 May 1997 This is the 25th-anniversary release of INTERCAL. This language, conceived in irony a quarter century ago today, has outlasted many more serious and high-minded essays in computer language design. This fact should give us pause to reflect, or possibly frighten the crap out of us. Or both. 1. Corrected manual bugs. 2. Fixed over-enthusiastic install production in the Makefile. 3. DO PLEASE is no longer accepted (Brian Raiter pointed out that the manual does not sanction it). 4. Fixed various bugs in the optimizer. 5. Incorporated fixes made by William Walter Patterson for bugs that appeared when multiple files are given on the command line. (The following changes are due to Brian Raiter) 6. The system library is now available for TriINTERCAL (all bases, 3 to 7). The compiler has been updated to use the right library automagically. 7. The error 774 feature has been brought into conformance with the Princeton compiler. The odds are now a flat 10% (but still 0% with -b). 8. The compiler has been modified to allocate memory dynamically, and the hard-coded limits on program size and number of variables has been removed. Programs are now only limited by the amount of available memory. 9. Array output now fflushes after outputting newlines. 10. Two minor bug fixes: one in wimpmode input, which was clamping input to the signed integer range, and one in politesse checking. The latter was causing programs to be recognized as impolite only if their ratio was less that one-sixth, not one-fifth. (Fixing this also necessitated adding a few PLEASEs to pit/rot13.i.) 11. Several new programs have been tossed into the pit. Release 0.15 (by Eric S. Raymond) 20 Jun 1996 1. Switched the INTERCAL manual master to mgm in order to be able to handle section crossreferences properly. The manual has now been carefully proofread against the paper version by ESR and seems to match. It's also been independently proofread for typos by Brian Raiter. 2. The optimizer now does complete analysis and evaluation of constant expressions at compile time. 3. Added optimization templates for ~, |, &, ^ expressions. Also added |, &, ^ idioms to the system library, and documented them. (The following changes are due to Brian Raiter) 4. Every one of the INTERCAL-72 messages is now emitted when appropriate. including the previously un-emitted E000, E197, and E200 (and see below). 5. A close reading (while proofing) of the sections of the manual on error messages seems to indicate that splatted lines were only splatted in the default listing printed after a successful compile. (This seems to be a standard feature of IBM compilers; I remember that RPG did this as well.) My understanding of the manual is when the syntactically offensive line is encountered at runtime, it is printed as error E000. I have modified the code to do this. 6. I have fixed INTERCAL in order to add another bug. Namely, I have implemented the BUG/NOBUG option in the Princeton compiler. By default, there is a chance that INTERCAL will randomly insert error E774 into your executable. (The odds are 1/128 per statement, not counting COME FROMs. Is there any way to find out what the Princeton compiler's odds were?) The new option -b turns this feature off. 7. The new file pit/lib/numio.i contains routines for wimpmode I/O. These routines are documented in the file pit/lib/numio.doc. It is my earnest hope that C-INTERCAL programmers everywhere will flock to these handy routines, and C-INTERCAL users will thus no longer need to fear that they might succumb to the foul and awful temptation to use the dastardly +wimpmode option. Release 0.14 (by Eric S. Raymond) 9 Jun 1996 1. The documentation has been reorganized and cleaned up (you can now format either a C-INTERCAL or INTERCAL-72 manual from the same master). The diagrams in the paper original have been transcribed as pic figures. See doc/READ.ME for details. 2. Yet more code. The pit now includes a second random-number generator, a ROT13 filter, and even two programs in TriINTERCAL! 3. Louis Howell's corrected system library is now included. 4. The distribution is now formally GPLed. Release 0.13 (by Eric S. Raymond) 5 Jun 1996 1. I folded in patches by Brian Raiter that port this code to Linux, ANSIfies it, and enables it to use flex. Note: This version has been tested on Linux and SunOS but not yet elsewhere. 2. Another piece of nontrivial INTERCAL code has been found! (Doubtless hell is freezing over even as I write.) We've added to the pit the `beer' program by Matt DiMeo , courtesy of the infamous Beer List (URL:http://www.ionet.net/~timtroyr/funhouse/beer.html). Release 0.12 (by Eric S. Raymond) 22 Mar 1995 1. The code now compiles and runs under Linux, using bison and lex. It does *not* yet work with flex; C.P. Osborne's patches for 0.11 turned out not to be sufficient (at least for flex 2.4.6 under Linux using the -l option). See the BUGS list. 2. Note 3 under 0.11 was incorrect. We're in conformance after all. 3. The politesse check is a little smarter about programs too small to conform to the 1/5-to-1/3 criterion. All the pit programs have been checked for conformance. Also, the politesse error message now tells you the offending program's line count. Release 0.11 (by Eric S. Raymond) 24 Sep 1994 1. Incorporated changes by Jan-Pieter Cornet for magical inclusion of the system library. These address an outstanding bug 2. (SS) The `system library' should be precompiled and `linked' to user written code, at least optionally. Doing this with the current compiler presents a few problems. which has accordingly been removed from the BUGS file. They also fix a previously unknown bug; due to a minor oversight in the lexer, it was not possible to ABSTAIN FROM WRITING IN or READING OUT. Jan also contributed a test program that demonstrates gerund abstention. 2. Despite the obvious appeal of the idea, and much discussion on alt.lang.intercal, I decided *not* to add Klingon; maintaining two parallel grammars just so the compiler could support SVO and OSV languages would be too painful. There was also a minor mess near case-sensitivity in the digits. The workaround kluges I was offered instead failed to satisfy. 3. We fess up to a violation of the INTERCAL-72 standard. That implementation, instead of accepting an entire multiple-digit number per line of input, expected one digit per *card image* (input line). It is unclear how INTERCAL-72 programs ever managed to input more than one number. 4. Added patches by C.P.Osborne to make the lexer work using flex, for Linux and BSD/386 support. I didn't use his error-reporting patch, though; instead, I changed the parser to catch errors at logical-line level. I also kept the N in `RESUBNIT'; this is a carefully preserved feature of INTERCAL-72. 5. Volapuk digits are now recognized on input. TO DO: Recognize Volapuk keywords, including gerunds. Release 0.10 (by Eric S. Raymond) 9 Sep 1994 1. It is now possible to undo a line-number abstention with a gerund reinstatement, or undo a gerund abstention with a line-number reinstatement. In previous versions, gerund abstention/reinstatements and line-number abstention/reinstatements were independent of each other. 2. After release 0.5, I wrote in the TO DO list as follows: 2. (ESR) Input format internationalization -- allow WRITE IN input digits in major languages such as Nahuatl, Tagalog, Sanskrit, and Basque. The twisted loons in the alt.folklore.computers crowd loved this idea, and I actually got sent digit lists for Nahuatl, Tagalog, Sanskrit, and Basque -- also, Kwakiutl, Georgian, Ojibwe, and Albanian. I've left out Albanian (didn't want to keep track of the dipthong diacritical) and Ojibwe (no zero digit). So: Nahuatl, Tagalog, Sanskrit, Basque, Georgian, and Kwakiutl are now supported in addition to English. 3. The THEORY document has been significantly revised. Release 0.9 (by Eric S. Raymond) 5 Mar 1993 1. An embarrassing port bug in the INTERCAL skeleton has been fixed 2. Jamie Zawinski's suggestion for an improved E333 error message has been accepted. 3. Added and improved documentation for pit programs. 4. The install production in the Makefile now puts lose.h in place as well as cesspool.h. 5. You can now set the C compiler to be used as a back end by INTERCAL by setting the environment variable CC. The default is cc. Release 0.8 (many hacks on 0.7 by Eric Raymond) 21 Jan 1992 1. A previously undocumented `feature' of the Princeton compiler, revealed by Don Woods, is now emulated. If fewer than 1/5 or more than 1/3 of a program's statements contain the qualifier `PLEASE', the program is rejected with an entertaining error message. Programs in pit have been hacked to pass the politesse test. 2. The `sample' program now works correctly, thanks to Louis Howell. Also, he has contributed new programs to calculate pi and to search for prime numbers. 3. An intercal mode for GNU Emacs is included. It helps programmers deal with the new politesse check by randomly expanding the abbrev "do" to DO PLEASE or PLEASE DO about 1/4 of the time. 4. Improvements in code generation for NEXT/RESUME. 5. Fixes to the optimizer; it handles the results of optimized MINGLEs correctly now. Also, added a rewrite rule that checks for the equality-test idiom using XOR. 6. The original error messages from the Princeton compiler have been restored. The documentation has been updated to reflect these changes. Release 0.7 (by Louis Howell) 21 Dec 1991 In addition to bug fixes, new features in this version include arrays, character I/O, modified (hopefully improved!) semantics for the COME FROM statement, extensions to bases other than 2, new INTERCAL programs, and new documentation. Release 0.6 (by Steve Swales) 5 Jan 1991 1. Restored Princeton documentation (courtesy of Michael Ernst). 2. Added -@ usage option to ick. 3. Added [+/-]help, [+/-]traditional, and [+/-]wimpmode options for generated programs; [+/-]traditional is a no-op at this point. 4. Various bug fixes, esp. in lexical analysis. Release 0.5 (ESR's original pre-release) 5 Jun 1990 1. As a convenience to all you junior birdmen out there, `NINER' is accepted as a synonym for `NINE' in INTERCAL input. 2. The COME FROM statement is now compiled. ------------- The resurrection of INTERCAL from its grave took place on 12 May 90 when ESR released 0.3 on an unsuspecting USENET.