Editing INTERCAL (section)

== Documentation ==
[[File:INTERCAL Circuitous Diagram.svg|thumb|The "circuitous diagram" from the INTERCAL Reference Manual, purportedly to explain the operation of the "select" operator]]
The INTERCAL Reference Manual contains many paradoxical, nonsensical, or otherwise humorous instructions:

{{quote| Caution! Under no circumstances confuse the mesh with the interleave operator, except under confusing circumstances! }}

The manual also contains a "[[tonsil]]", as explained in this footnote: "4) Since all other reference manuals have appendices, it was decided that the INTERCAL manual should contain some other type of removable organ."<ref name="manual72"/>

The INTERCAL manual gives unusual names to all non-alphanumeric [[ASCII]] characters: single and double quotes are 'sparks' and "rabbit ears" respectively. (The exception is the [[ampersand]]: as the [[Jargon File]] states, "what could be sillier?") The assignment operator, represented as an equals sign (INTERCAL's "half mesh") in many other programming languages, is in INTERCAL a left-arrow, <code><-</code>, made up of an "angle" and a "worm", obviously read as "gets".