What this is

Welcome, visitors

PLEASE ABSTAIN is the steward organization for INTERCAL-64 — the 64-bit descendant of the 1972 Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. PLEASE ABSTAIN took custody of the project in June 2026 and now manage the following:

The language,
The reference compiler churn, and
New 64-bit library development and distribution,
An IDE based on Visual Studio code

INTERCAL was designed in 1972 to resemble no other programming language, and fifty years later it still succeeds. INTERCAL-64 carries that ambition to 64 bits: real arithmetic, a genuine debugger, and formal proofs that its worst ideas are load-bearing. Everything here is documented, tested, and — most alarmingly — genuinely usable.

Start with the language →

What we maintain

The Language

The IC64 dialect — 64-bit arithmetic, three new variable types, and every operator classic INTERCAL ever had. 100% backwards compatible.

Read the reference →

The Compiler

The reference compiler. Parses INTERCAL, emits C#, and builds real .NET assemblies — single files or multi-file projects.

Compile something →

The Libraries

syslib64: arithmetic at 16, 32, and 64 bits, written in pure INTERCAL — shipped as source you can read and a binary you can link.

Browse the routines →

The IDE

Syntax highlighting, snippets, and the first real debugger INTERCAL has ever had. Set a breakpoint on a line you don't understand and watch it not help.

Open in VS Code →

The archives

Papers & Case Studies

Serious formal work, conducted on an unserious substrate.

Papers

Including COME FROM Considered Necessary — a formal argument that INTERCAL's most notorious construct is not optional.

Read the papers →

Case Studies

Warnsdorff's knight's tour, Hilbert-curve geospatial indexing, stable marriage — algorithms implemented, improbably, in INTERCAL.

See the specimens →

Learn INTERCAL

A guided introduction for the morbidly curious. You will need at least the correct number of PLEASEs. It will not tell you what that is.

Begin, unwisely →

Provenance

INTERCAL was created by Don Woods and James M. Lyon in 1972. The enduring C-INTERCAL implementation is maintained by Eric S. Raymond and others. Further specimens are cataloged on the Esolang wiki. We didn't invent the language — but the two compilers and the VS Code support are ours.