Max Noel wrote:
On Feb 3, 2005, at 23:41, Jeff Shannon wrote:
(But then, at my job I'm stuck using a horrible Frankenstein's monster of a proprietary language on a daily basis, so I can't help but believe that there's plenty more awful languages around that didn't happen to be "rescued" from oblivion by an accident of history...)
Yeah. Sometimes I read a little bit of Wikipedia's "Esoteric Programming Languages" page, and some of them just leave me in awe. Brainfuck (and its variant Ook!) and INTERCAL ("GOTO is considered harmful, so we removed it -- INTERCAL uses COME FROM instead") are already quite impressive, but the very idea of Befunge makes my brain want to explode. Especially that extension to the language that allows one to write N-dimensional programs. :D
The difference here is that those are languages that were *intended* to be brain-melting. The language I'm talking about (Pick Proc, aka UHL) was intended to do real work with -- though at times I think it was designed by a brain-damaged lemur that was huffing paint fumes.
For example, every line (except flow-control statements i.e. 'if' and 'go' (there's a few other exceptions as well, but anyhow...)) must begin with a single character that denotes what the line does - 'c' for comment, 'o' for output (print to terminal), 'h' to build a command, 'p' to execute that command... empty lines are forbidden. Note also that the position *after* the final newline character is considered a line, and therefore a file cannot end with a newline.
Especially when combined with several of the utilities that it's commonly used to script for, it begins to approach Perl in indecipherability, without even having the excuse of being largely non-alpha characters.
I'd consider writing a Python extension that would interact with the system such that I wouldn't need to use this awful little scripting language, but that would require more effort and thought than I'm willing to invest in learning the details of this system.
Jeff Shannon Technician/Programmer Credit International
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