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I want to run it, but do I have anything to fear? "Black Perl" suggests it's going to do some bad stuff to my box.
by bmmayer1 13y ago
I want to run it, but do I have anything to fear? "Black Perl" suggests it's going to do some bad stuff to my box.
- shubb 13y agoHaha, I don't think this script does much on a machine. It is designed to be interpreted by humans though.
- glockular 13y agodid you even read the article? it was written for (and runs fine on) perl 3. it's basically a huge nop.
- roberto 13y agoNo, the whole point is that this run on Perl 3. It's valid code.
- shubb 13y agoYeah, I get that it's valid Perl code, but it doesn't cause the computer to do something, or give an interesting output. A human can read it and find it interesting. I tried to say that in a witty way. Oh well...
- eruditely 13y agoSo what if it doesn't do anything?
- gph 13y agoIt not doing anything isn't the point. The point is that it's technically valid code, but is still relevant to human interpretation.
- nrivadeneira 13y agoWell, he's answering @bmmayer1's question. It does not do anything, so it is safe to run on your computer.
- darkxanthos 13y agoThe commenter isn't putting it down for that, just explaining he'd be surprised if it did anything let alone something mischievous.
- lifeformed 13y agoOh man, imagine a poem like this that outputted something relevant to the theme of the poem. That'd be amazing.
- justinator 13y agoC'mon man, this is Perl. Easy things are easy, Hard things are possible. In reverse: https://gist.github.com/justingit/6533386 https://gist.github.com/justingit/6533386
- area51org 13y agoI remember this -- I swear this was in one of the Perl books (the Camel book?) way back when. It's valid Perl 3, but it is not supposed to do anything useful. The idea is simply to show how expressive you could be in the language.
- steveklabnik 13y agoIt is in my edition of the camel.
- nandhp 13y agoMost of the discussion on Perl Poetry in the Camel Book is by way of inclusion of this Usenet post: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/news.groups/qSO-Q0rxg_E/RrRnThLKrMMJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/news.groups/qSO-Q0rxg_E/RrRn...
- andreasvc 13y agoI don't understand what you mean by 'expressive' in this sentence: if it's not to make the program do something specific, you could just wrap everything in a comment block and be as 'expressive' as you like in any language.
- mst 13y agoI elaborated on actual expressiveness here: http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/pizza-snakes-bicycle/ http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/pizza-snakes-bicycle/ (which post starts by quoting the Black Perl to put you in the mood :)
- rjbond3rd 13y ago"perl -c" checks syntax without executing. (Try it and you'll see a lot of syntax errors using perl 5, so no chance of it executing -- but even if you run it under perl 3, you have nothing to fear.)
- cdman 13y agoCareful with that. perl -c still runs the BEGIN blocks so don't rely on it for safety (ie. if you're handling untrusted code).
- Roboprog 13y agoBob Howard will come and get you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Archives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Archives