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A comment on Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedish Navy?. Parent comment

Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by schoen on Thursday February 26, 2015 @12:51AM (#9111328)
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!).

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Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by davidweir on Thursday February 26, 2015 @02:17AM (#9111459)
In addition to "the quick and the dead", it also appears in the idiom "(cut) to the quick", meaning to cut someone deeply - usually emotionally.

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-.

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Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by ithkuil on Thursday February 26, 2015 @04:19AM (#9111721)
In Croatian "Quicksilver" is called "Živa", which also means "alive".
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Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by V-2 on Thursday February 26, 2015 @05:59AM (#9111968)
same in Polish ("żywe srebro"). eg. http://www.filmweb.pl/film/%C5%BBywe+srebro-1986-9031
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Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by unwind on Thursday February 26, 2015 @03:37AM (#9111614)
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.
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Re:Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedis... by m_eiman on Thursday February 26, 2015 @04:14AM (#9111709)
kvikkalkul sounds Norwegian rather than Swedish. It'd mean "fast calculation", more or less.

There's also Plankalkül by Zuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

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