Governance
Board of Directors
PLEASE ABSTAIN is governed by a Board of Directors, who meet quarterly and disperse immediately. The board oversees the four mandates — the language, its libraries, the compiler, and the IDE — and is otherwise unaccountable.
The Board
Jason Whittington
Founder & Chair. Wrote cringe in 2003 to establish whether INTERCAL could be made worse. It could. Has chaired every meeting since, and abstained from most of them.
Anonymous
Director of Implementation. Provided the computational assistance that wrote most of syslib64 and wishes to remain unnamed. Attends every meeting; appears in no minutes.
The Director of Politeness Compliance
Vacant. Responsible for keeping the ratio of PLEASE between one statement in five and one in three. No candidate has been found who is sufficiently, but not excessively, polite.
The Chief COME FROM Officer
Incumbent. Did not apply for the position. Was pulled into it from an unrelated line of the agenda and has been unable to establish how.
The Director of Overflow
Currently abstained. Reports directly to label (1999). Reinstated only when a result exceeds the width of its operands, at which point the board hears from them at length.
The Treasurer
ABSTAINED FROM by unanimous vote. The board determined that money, like the 128-bit mingle, is ephemeral and cannot be stored in any variable.
The Corporate Secretary
Incumbent. Records all minutes as big-endian 64-bit labels. To date, no one has been able to read them back.
Governance
- Quorum is achieved when at least one director in five present says
PLEASE. - Motions are not voted on; they are
COME FROM'd. A director wishing to pass one places a label elsewhere in the agenda and waits to be pulled into it. - Any director may
ABSTAIN FROM CALCULATINGat any time. Most do. - Meetings adjourn with
GIVE UP.
The board serves in the tradition established by Don Woods and James M. Lyon (Princeton, 1972), who are not responsible for any of this.
