h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's something inherently weird about a C-Compiler being written in C. That's such a circular existence that it makes my head spin.

Back in the mists of time, there had to be a C-Compiler that was written in Assembly code. Probably find that if you trace the creation of every C-compiler backwards to the compiler it was written on, they all lead back to one compiler.

ALL HAIL THE ONE TRUE COMPILER!

Another way of looking at the C language is that it is simply a powerful macro language for assembler programming. I started programming before any compilers existed and symbolic assembler was a high level language. Any programmer experienced in assembler, when introduced to the C language, can "see right through it" to the machine language code that will be produced by the compiler.

Yeah ... thats why C is so good. It's like writing a good poem ... you know it works, when it looks beautiful.

C is the only programming language that you can write poetry on.

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PHP?

Yes PHP.
Hypertext Preprocessor
With PHP it is possible to let HTML Sites write themselves. The commands will be interpretated by the webserver before sending the site to the browser. That's a lot more flexible than java or perl ever could be.
(and it's C )

if ( PHP == Hypertext Preprocessor )
where does the first P come from ;

I'm not the inventor, but Hypertext PreProcessor has an H and two P's

Hmm... I just thought it would be HPP that's all.

By all accounts you can do some good stuff with it. I haven't had a chance to play yet, as I don't think IIS supports it (?), but anyway that's OT.

You can also write poetry in perl. Some poems are syntactically correct, but do nothing, but the real greats actually work.

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It may not be poetry, but it's beautiful - the 'eight queens' problem in 3(ish) lines:

{
for(scanf("%d",&s);*a-s;v=a[j*=v]-a[i],k=i<s,j+=(v=j<s&&(!k&&!!printf(2+"\n\n%c"-(!l<<!j)," #Q"[l^v?(l^j)&1:2])&&++l||a[i]<s&&v&&v-i+j&&v+i-j))&&!(l%=s),v||(i==j?a[i+=k]=0:++a[i])>=s*k&&++a[--i]);
}

Hope I didn't mistype any of that

Al (et al)

Absolutly fascinating!
Do you know how long the last solvation of the eight queens problem was I had to type?

no, tell me.

About some pages. My teacher is a bit strict with this things.
Why take the short solution if you can write a lot more comments in the long one?

Apart from some well documented Perl programs...