PLEASEABSTAIN

Difficult tools for easy problems.

· DVBIVM MERITVM · EST. MMIII ·

PLEASE ABSTAIN is the steward organization for INTERCAL-64 — the 64-bit descendant of the 1972 Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. INTERCAL64 was originally conceived and created by Jason Whittingon, who still gets hostile when we bring it up. PLEASE ABSTAIN wrested control of the IP in June 2026 and now manages the following:

INTERCAL certainly demonstrated...something in 1972 but by 2026 it was aging. 16 bits are fine for retro side scrollers but not for solving today's challenging problems. INTERCAL-64 carries that ambition to 64 bits: bigger labels, more annoying arithmetic. It still doesn't really solve today's problems but it does manage to burn impressive amounts of electrity in the attempt.

PLEASE ABSTAIN inherited a hostile forum full of unhappy customers so it sponsored the creation of the ultimate wimpmode: a full debugger that runs in Visual Studio Code. 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 Helpful — 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. Users who have difficulties are encouraged to abandon the effort: this group is called PLEASE ABSTAIN for a reason.

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.