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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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...
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 61.7 ms ] threadSweden hasn't practiced capital punishment since 1910.
The Swedish Wikipedia has an article about it (describing it as likely being fiction) here: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikkalkul
(I am Swedish.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Sweden
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!).
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-.
There's also Plankalkül by Zuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl
Nope nope nope...my suspension of disbelief popped right there. Great troll, tho.
Yeah, sounds legit. I got a good laugh though.
Facepalm.
The code is a little rough, but it works.
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:
The logic being that the variable should be empty upon explosion...http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/series/18329/