computer silliness

Seth Gordon sgordon at kenan.com
Tue Mar 16 15:24:46 PST 1999



> >perl -le" ... "
>
> What in god's name does all that mean?
>
> Doug

It means I'm a geek.

More precisely, it's a "japh": a Rube-Goldberg-ish Perl program that, when executed, will print out "Just another Perl hacker,".

Among some computer programmers (and some ersatz computer programmers like myself :-), writing a program that performs a simple task in a bizarrely obscure way is a sort of art form. The japh is one example of this art form. Another is the International Obfuscated C Coding Contest, which produced winners like this:

/*

* HELLO WORLD program

* by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985

*/ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c)); **c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);}

A friend of mine once wrote a BASIC interpreter in TeX; TeX is a powerful typesetting system, very popular for scientific and mathematical publications, that most people don't think of as a computer language. (To connect to the earlier Linux thread, TeX is free...)

-- perl -le"for(@w=(q[dm='r 0rJaa,u0cksthe';dc=967150;dz=~s/d/substrdm,\ (di+=dc%2?4:1)%=16,1ordi-2?'no':'Perl h'/e whiledc>>=1;printdz]))\ {s/d/chr(36)/eg;eval;}#In Windows type this all on 1 line w/o '\'s" == seth gordon == sgordon at kenan.com == standard disclaimer == == documentation group, kenan systems corp., cambridge, ma ==



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