3 ms·
That’s already mentioned in the third paragraph but it’s nice of you to also include the bytecode in the comment. > Apparently in 1984, a strange program won t
by alin23 5y ago
That’s already mentioned in the third paragraph but it’s nice of you to also include the bytecode in the comment.
> Apparently in 1984, a strange program won the IOCCC where main was declared as a short main[] = {...} and somehow this did stuff and printed to the screen!
- ianhanschen 5y agoBarely mentioned, and the author makes us all die inside when they say "Too bad it was written for a whole different architecture and compiler so there is really no easy way for me to find out what it did."
- _kst_ 5y agoAs the hint explains, it's a combination of PDP-11 and VAX machine code, set up so that either system will run its own code and ignore the foreign code. You can extract a few ASCII strings from the data. As the hint says: "Can you guess what is printed? We knew you couldn't! :-)" The ASCII strings I found were "vax", "pdp", "str", "write", and " :-)".
- cptnapalm 5y agoSo not only did they write something baffling, they also wrote it so that it was semi-portable.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoI wonder what strange and interesting things in the computing world we’ve simply lost by forgetting and from moving on.