What's the strangest language you've ever programmed in?

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LordoftheMonkeys
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04 Feb 2010, 12:08 pm

Mine would definitely be sed. It has a very unique syntax that is completely illegible to most programmers. Here's a script I wrote that counts the lines in a file:

Code:
#!/usr/bin/sed

s/^.*$/|/
H
${
   x
   s/\n//g
   p
}


Pretty weird, isn't it?

So, what's the strangest programming language you've used? What part of it was strange?



pakled
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04 Feb 2010, 1:23 pm

Probably RPG2 (not the rocket launcher) - a minicomputer language, entirely based on printed forms!
It was like doing the SATs, put an x in the wrong column, and it printed a line every page instead of every line. What a tree-killer that was...;)


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GeomAsp
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04 Feb 2010, 1:42 pm

TCL/TK. I just wrote some lines, copy here and paste there.


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Apera
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04 Feb 2010, 2:39 pm

I'm going with COBOL. It's just... english. That said, I don't have much experience programming. I also 'wrote' and RPG program, so I know what Pakled means.


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DemonAbyss10
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04 Feb 2010, 2:56 pm

Tried out LOLCODE because ive gotten massively bored once. That was a.... unique... experience...

As for stuff I do know, that isnt wierd, C++, javascript, and basic/Visual Basic


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TallyMan
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04 Feb 2010, 3:37 pm

DCL (Digital Control Language). I wrote a pseudo-AI / virtual computer operator in DCL. It ran on a DEC mainframe under its own username (Marvin) and handled a variety of operator duties such as notifying the relevant people if particular printers jammed or ran out of paper. It ran various updates, backups, generated reports, got the users to log out at certain times, kicked other users off the system that had left their terminal logged in unattended for twenty minutes, it looked for unusual computer activity etc. "Marvin" became so ubiquitous within the company that people sometimes phoned the computer department and asked to speak to Marvin. :lol:


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04 Feb 2010, 3:44 pm

Lisp.

To this day, any time I'm writing list management code I look at it once I'm done and think something along the lines of: "50 Lines! And in Lisp I could've done the whole thing with car-car-cdr!"

Functional programming changes your head.



roadracer
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04 Feb 2010, 8:21 pm

Quote:
Lisp.

yep, it has trouble with its "s"

:lol:



AnotherOne
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04 Feb 2010, 8:36 pm

labview. it has pictures instead of subroutines and functions that one wires to create input/output and connect to variables.
it is a nightmare for someone who did "proper" programming languages.



Vexcalibur
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04 Feb 2010, 11:02 pm

whitespace

LISP actually makes a lot more sense than some of the more mainstream languages out there.


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KazigluBey
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04 Feb 2010, 11:14 pm

pakled wrote:
Probably RPG2 (not the rocket launcher) - a minicomputer language, entirely based on printed forms!
It was like doing the SATs, put an x in the wrong column, and it printed a line every page instead of every line. What a tree-killer that was...;)


While I haven't programmed in it, I am familiar with it and indeed and odd one.



ValMikeSmith
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05 Feb 2010, 5:43 am

EGG- for a pysanky machine
VTL-02 (or VTL-09)
APL
Spin
Wireworld (I think it's called that)



peterd
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05 Feb 2010, 6:10 am

I'm not sure that any of them are actually wierd - the surrounding logic is always there, any wierdness just comes from unfamiliarity.

It took me a while to get used to XQuery, and the way trying to change the value of something failed silently, but once I got used to that I came to like it: Java feels like it's cheating now, although I know it's just being procedural.

XSL is still pretty unusual, I must confess, but it's like hanging out washing. Once you know how it's supposed to go it looks right when it is and wrong when it's not.

RPG was a little bit strange, but when we lived in a world of coding forms it made sense. Once upon a time I worked for a while with an IBM machine called a 5280 which one programmed in a language called DE/RPG which was like RPG but with extensions. The 5280 had several processors in it, and you can imagine what sort of contortions RPG went through to make sense of that.

COBOL - no, COBOL always made perfect sense. Even with screen sections in it, it always made sense. Back in the '70s I made a whole accounting system for a range of machines from Data General in an interactive COBOL.

APL is probably the closest I've come to complete incomprehensibility: being able to compress a whole program into a single line is an impressive feat, even if it does take two days to unpack it far enough to be comprehensible.



iceb
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05 Feb 2010, 11:46 am

Prolog


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TOGGI3
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05 Feb 2010, 1:07 pm

The strangest I can *think* of, but havent really done anything in is Brainf***, look it up, I wont link it or spell out the name (im sure you can figure it out) simply because of the name containing inappropriate language.



Vexcalibur
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05 Feb 2010, 10:42 pm

brainfuck is ok, but the problem is that no matter what you code on it, it tends to be slower than with a normal language due to the strange rules.


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