"Perhaps it doesn't understand English," thought Alice. "I daresay it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror." (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.)

11. The Atari Implementation

The Atari implementation of INTERCAL differs from the original Princeton version primarily in the use of ASCII rather than EBCDIC. Since there is no change sign (¢) in ASCII, we have substituted the big money ($) as the mingle operator. We feel that this correctly represents the increasing cost of software in relation to hardware. (Consider that in 1970 one could get RUNOFF for free, to run on a $20K machine, whereas today a not quite as powerful formatter costs $99 and runs on a $75 machine.) We also feel that there should be no defensible contention that INTERCAL has any sense. Also, since overpunches are difficult to read on the average VDT, the exclusive-or operator may be written as what (?). This correctly expresses the average person's reaction on first encountering exclusive-or, especially on a PDP-11. Note that in both of these cases, the over-punched symbol may also be used if one is masochistic, or concerned with portability to the Princeton compiler. The correct overpunch for change is c<backspace>/; and the correct overpunch for bookworm is V<backspace>-. These codes will be properly printed if you have a proper printer, and the corresponding EBCDIC code will be produced by the /IBM option on the LIST command.