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5.4 Execution Chance

INTERCAL-72 C-INTERCAL CLC-INTERCAL J-INTERCAL
yes all versions version 0.02+ all versions

It’s possible to specify that a command should be run only a certain proportion of the time, at random. This is a rarely used feature of INTERCAL, although it is the only way to introduce randomness into a program. (The C-INTERCAL compiler approximates this with pseudorandomness.) An execution chance specification comes immediately after the statement identifier, but before the rest of the statement, and consists of a double-oh-seven (%) followed by an integer from 1 to 99 inclusive, written in decimal; this gives the percentage chance of the statement running. The execution chance only acts to prevent a statement running when it otherwise would have run; it cannot cause a statement that would otherwise not have run to run. For instance, the statement DO %40 WRITE OUT #1 has a 40% chance of writing out ‘I’, but the statement DON'T %40 WRITE OUT #1 has no chance of writing out I or anything else, because the N'T prevents it running and the double-oh-seven cannot override that.