I just shipped what was probably the silliest and most pointless software release of my career. But hey, it’s the reference implementation of a language and I’m funny that way.
Because I write compilers for fun, I have a standing offer out to reimplement any weird old language for which I am sent a sufficiently detailed softcopy spec. (I had to specify softcopy because scanning and typo-correcting hardcopy is too much work.)
In the quarter-century this offer has been active, I have (re) implemented at least the following: INTERCAL, Michigan Algorithmic Decoder, and a pair of obscure 1960s teaching languages called CORC and CUPL, and an obscure computer-aided-instruction language called Pilot.
Pilot…that one was special. Not in a good way, alas. I don’t know where I bumped into a friend of the language’s implementor, but it was in 1991 when he had just succeeded in getting IEEE to issue a standard for it – IEEE Std 1154-1991. He gave me a copy of the standard.
I should have been clued in by the fact that he also gave me an errata sheet not much shorter than the standard. But the full horror did not come home to me until I sat down and had a good look at both documents – and, friends, PILOT’s design was exceeded in awfulness only by the sloppiness and vagueness of its standard. Even after the corrections.