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

Loved the piece. It brought back good memories, and a few strange ones.

Another, even less known, language was TI-BASIC, a derivative used by the Texas Instruments home computer (TI-99 and TI-99 4A).

I believe there was another variation used by the Timex Sinclair.

++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

I love TI-BASIC! I use the abridged calculator version for math formulas all the time on my graphing calculator.

As to why no Fortran, RPG or COBOL, I mostly stuck to modern languages - I just used C for obvious reasons, and BASIC because I have a personal history with it; it was the first "Hello world!" I knew.

TRiG, I have no idea what you're going on about.

Thanks for reading!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/brainfuck

(I didn't expect that to post! I thought I'd have to tinyURL it.)

Impressive! (Both the language and the filter circumvention.)

And, thank you for responding, EMR

Glad to find another who remembers the TI language. I had ever so much fun using extended basic to create sprites to populate games I created for my son. Even creating characters and using overwrite routines gave decent levels of movement!

The TI-99er magazine offered a lot of tips and tricks, and held regular contests for who could get the most out of one line of code. Some of those were simply amazinng.

Nowadays, I do similar things with MS Excel formulas. Drives people nuts trying to suss them out, but they can do some sophisticated work.