Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedish Navy? | Hacker News Reader

Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedish Navy?

workbench.cadenhead.org

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The language appears to be fiction beyond these Usenet posts, and the same goes for the mentioned "SABINA" computer. Capital punishment, brought up as a common consequence of possessing this information in Sweden is, of course, incompatible with current Swedish society.

The Swedish Wikipedia has an article about it (describing it as likely being fiction) here: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikkalkul

(I am Swedish.)

Capital punishment was incompatible with Swedish law at the time of the posting as well. The Swedish constitution has prohibited it since 1975, but it was long-since abolished in practice, the last execution having taken place in 1910.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Sweden

Indeed, by "current" I had the last fifty years in mind. It seemed appropriate at the time of writing given that we speak of major changes to society, but perhaps there is a better word to describe this particular period of time.

That's what they want you to believe!

I suppose I'll just have to wait and see if there's some capital punishment coming my way ;-)

I was going to say "also, isn't the Swedish word for 'quick' snabb?" But then Wiktionary told me that there is, in fact, also a word kvick with a similar meaning.

Extra bonus: it turns out that quick/kvick is cognate with Italian/Spanish/Portuguese vivo 'alive' (which makes the older sense in "the quick and the dead" make more sense, too!).

In addition to "the quick and the dead", it also appears in the idiom "(cut) to the quick", meaning to cut someone deeply - usually emotionally.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_to_the_quick https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/to_the_quick

Take it back further, and it's cognate with bíos in ancient Greek, whence the prefix bio-.

In Croatian "Quicksilver" is called "Živa", which also means "alive".

same in Polish ("żywe srebro"). eg. http://www.filmweb.pl/film/%C5%BBywe+srebro-1986-9031

There is "kvick", sure. But "kalkul" certainly isn't a word. The closest match would be "kalkyl". So the language seems to be named by messing up the spelling of two words, which I guess isn't impossible but still somewhat ... weird.

kvikkalkul sounds Norwegian rather than Swedish. It'd mean "fast calculation", more or less.

There's also Plankalkül by Zuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

As a Swede I'm pretty sure Kvikkalkul is not something we'd name a programming language, it sounds more like Norwegian or Icelandish

As a sidenote I heard an anecdote about a guy who programmed warheads. He was writing the detonate code wondering how to exit gracefully when it exploded so he wrote something like:

   10: var a=5
   20: Detonate()
   30: If (a==5) goto 10;
   40: Exit;

The logic being that the variable should be empty upon explosion...

"Apart from real-time submarine applications such as guided torpedo control, I did an accounting package in kvikkalkul as well."

Yeah, sounds legit. I got a good laugh though.

He probably got the capital punishment. Saying that "I did an accounting package" doesn't seem like a great way to stay anonymous.

Is there any proof whatsoever for this? I'm extremely skeptical because the first post Usenet post warns that you'd be sentenced to death if you were in possession of information about Kvikkalkul.

Sweden hasn't practiced capital punishment since 1910.

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Am I the only one who read that and thought to myself, 'gee, why would he set his clock so far into the future?'

Facepalm.

Oh you youngsters, born just before Y2K...

I'm thinking about implementing a kvikkalkul interpreter in Common Lisp. Sounds like a fun weekend project.

Share on HN when finished :)

I've got a Ruby implementation underway. The parser and lexer works, and I just need to write a quick VM now: https://gist.github.com/ShaneWilton/62e72a36759aaacabd84

The code is a little rough, but it works.

Language development has since been taken over by IKEA and it's main use right now is programmatic furniture generation.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/series/18329/

this reminds me of FikaScript, the Swedish Javascript generator http://fikascript.se/

Haha, Quick Calcul[ation].

Quickcalcul?

There is an Ada to kvikkalkul translator and most new programs are written in Ada and then translated to kvikkalkul. The kvikkalkul version was the definitive program that was reviewed, approved, tested and maintained. There was also a Simula to kvikkalkul translator in the 70s and some programs were written with it.

Nope nope nope...my suspension of disbelief popped right there. Great troll, tho.

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