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7.7 READ OUT and WRITE IN

The READ OUT and WRITE IN commands are the output and input commands in INTERCAL; they allow communication between the program and its user. There was a numeric I/O mechanism implemented in INTERCAL-72, and it (or trivial variants) have been likewise implemented in all more modern variants. However, it had some obvious deficiences (such as not being able to read its own output) which meant that other methods of I/O were implemented in C-INTERCAL and CLC-INTERCAL.

The syntax of READ OUT and WRITE IN is the same in all cases: the name of the command followed by an intersection-separated list of items; the form of each item, the compiler you are using, and its command line arguments together determine what sort of I/O is used, which can be different for different elements in the list.