KvikKalkul '95, the new language

In 1957 the Swedish Navy developed the language 'kvikkalkul' for real-time
control in submarines. This language has long been top secret, but thanks to
Phil Hyatss (real name Carl Christofferson) most people outside Sweden know
of its existence. Carl Christofferson worked for the Swedish Navy from 1957
to 1958 and in 1965 he moved to the U.K. where he worked for MI5 and MI6
(home and foreign intelligence service). His name became Phil Hyatss. In
1994 he sent a few anonymous postings about 'kvikkalkul' to
alt.folklore.computers. Thanks to our friend Ronny (we don't mention his
last name, but let's call him Butthead Sect Leader) we all know how easy it
is to get the real identity of anonymous posts. So the Swedish authorities
finally nailed him down and now he is in prison.

The story of 'kvikkalkul' does not end here. Now that the secret has been
broken, the Swedish military authorities finally decided to declassify and
commercialize 'kvikkalkul'. The new modernized language is called
KvikKalkul '95 (note the BiCapitalization). It is still a language without
letters, though it is not entered in Baudot code on paper tape anymore. The
only available data type is still the fixed point binary fractional number
between -1 and +1. These concepts are the key points of the strength of the
language and changing them would take the soul out of it. 

What's new is that the language is object oriented. Even COBOL goes OO, so
KvikKalkul had to follow the trend.

The next code sample demonstrates how you define a class with 1 instance
variable and 3 methods. The I.D. of the class is 4444. Everything between
the first line and ?? is method declaration. Below is the code for the
methods themselves. There are three methods, one to retrieve the value of
the instance variable to register 0, one to store the value of register .0
into the instance variable and one to add the value of register .0 into the
instance variable.

4444? 1
:1 -) 4445
:2 -) 4446
:3 -) 4447
??

4445:
 .0 (- /0
 -) :0 

4446:
 /0 (- .0  
 -) :0

4447:
 /0 (- .0 -/- /0
 -) :0

Now that the class has been declared, we want to declare an object of that
class.

3360! 4444 1 

This reserves space for 1 object with I.D. 4444 at data label 3360.
Finally we can use the object. The first line assigns 1/3 to register 0. The
second line sets the subroutine return address to 2222. The third line makes
the data pointer /0 point to the object. The next line calls method 2 (store
register .0 into the instance variable). 

.0 (- ,33333333333
:0 -) 2222
/0 -) 3360
-) :2
2222:

There are also ways to define subclasses, but these are beyond the scope of
this short explanation.

Many new library functions and O.S. services have been added since the last
official standard from 1988. The new language comes in two versions, the
civilian version and the military version. The military version is fully
compatible with all previous versions, but in the civilian version some of
the more arcane library routines have been removed. Further the CLASSIMATH
rules are not followed for the mathematical functions. In the early days of
computing the mathematical functions like sqrt and log had significant
inaccuracies. These have become an essential part of many military algorithms.
These algorithms would not work with the standard high accuracy values of
these functions. Of course the exact nature of these inaccuracies is still
classified and is part of the military version of the KvikKalkul standard.

One of the world's leading software companies (headed by Guillaume Portes)
has promised to release Visual KvikKalkul as one of the development
environments for Windows '95. Visual KvikKalkul is an implementation of
KvikKalkul '95 that is encapsulated in a user-friendly programmer-hostile
window environment in which you have to wear out a mouse or two to write a
trivial application that requires 16MByte to run and that takes 5 minutes
just to load. But you do have sculpted 3D buttons for 'Abort Retry Ignore'
if there is a disk read error. The user interface management code is
automatically generated by Visual KvikKalkul and you have to add only the
code to do the data processing. That needn't be much in the average
application and a few errors in the math are not that disastrous. Kids find
it funny to experiment with Visual KvikKalkul. "Kids are like cats, they
both like mice", a spokesman of the software company says. The funny
smiley-like KvikKalkul syntax is rendered in cute colors and kids tend to
like that too. The syntax directed editor helps kids write code that will
compile first time. The fact that kids probably won't understand what they
write and make a few semantic errors, that is of much lesser importance.
Take the Windows calculator as an example. The shape and the rendering of
the buttons, that's what impresses people. Nobody cares what 2.01 - 2 really
is.  

Programming, it's so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it.
- Guillaume Portes.