1970s Nerd Programmers 1 - ChatGPT 0

This is for the geeks, nerds, and allies in the crowd. INTERCAL: Practically Impossible

A very good friend of mine has been experimenting with trying to coax Chat-GPT to successfully do basic coding tasks. So have a lot of people these days, of course. In an idle moment, though, my friend submitted the following query:

Please write a password generation program using the Intercal computer programming language.

ChatGPT responded with the long-winded paragraph that included the phrase, "Therefore, creating a password generator in INTERCAL is practically impossible."

WOOT! INTERCAL (it is correct to type it in all caps) is Turing Complete, which means you can do anything, even if it is difficult. For example, here is the standard "Hello World" program from the article.

DO :1 <- #13
PLEASE DO :1 SUB #1 <- #238
DO :1 SUB #2 <- #108
DO :1 SUB #3 <- #112
DO :1 SUB #4 <- #0
DO :1 SUB #5 <- #64
DO :1 SUB #6 <- #194
DO :1 SUB #7 <- #48
PLEASE READ OUT :1
PLEASE GIVE UP

INTERCAL does have a random number generator built into the language, so it would be easy to write a PW generator in INTERCAL. OK, not EASY, but easier than a lot of programs. (Did I mention the Devil's programming language? No. See below.)

But back to the "practically impossible" statement. If you get about 3/4 to the end of the article, you will find a PW generator written in INTERCAL. So there. (Well in the C-INTERCAL dialect, but one is available in the 1972 original version of INTERCAL.) "So there!"

INTERCAL is not the most user friendly programming language. Here is what I said in 2020. The Computer Language With No Readily Pronounceable Acronym

The full name of the programming language, as described in the programming reference manual, is a follows:

The full name of the compiler is "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym", which is, for obvious reasons, abbreviated "INTERCAL".

INTERCAL, to choose one example, not at random, will throw an error if you don't use the word "Please" enough. You are being rude, and the compiler will not accept that. If you use Please too much, you are being overly polite and your program will be rejected.

It doesn't produce error messages, it just ignores lines in the program that don't compile. That makes debugging "challenging." Which is why I said this:

I used to think that INTERCAL was the Devil’s programming language. Not that I ever actually programmed in it. But that title goes to a different language. (We may get there eventually.)

That other language, if anyone is interested, is MALBOLGE.

Back to ChatGPT and it's BS answer to the query in the first link above.

As for the rest, Chat-GPT remains true to form in that, like most bullshitters, it succeeds most when it confines itself to generalities. The moment it blunders into specificity, it gets itself in trouble.