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Comment by Zirro | Hacker News Reader

The language appears to be fiction beyond these Usenet posts, and the same goes for the mentioned "SABINA" computer. Capital punishment, brought up as a common consequence of possessing this information in Sweden is, of course, incompatible with current Swedish society.

The Swedish Wikipedia has an article about it (describing it as likely being fiction) here: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvikkalkul

(I am Swedish.)

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Capital punishment was incompatible with Swedish law at the time of the posting as well. The Swedish constitution has prohibited it since 1975, but it was long-since abolished in practice, the last execution having taken place in 1910.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Sweden

Indeed, by "current" I had the last fifty years in mind. It seemed appropriate at the time of writing given that we speak of major changes to society, but perhaps there is a better word to describe this particular period of time.

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!).

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-.

In Croatian "Quicksilver" is called "Živa", which also means "alive".

same in Polish ("żywe srebro"). eg. http://www.filmweb.pl/film/%C5%BBywe+srebro-1986-9031

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.

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

That's what they want you to believe!

I suppose I'll just have to wait and see if there's some capital punishment coming my way ;-)

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