Orthodox platform agnosticism

June 24, 2006 10:05 AM

I dare you to throw a bunch of compilers at me! Pshaw!
posted by Blazecock Pileon (18 comments total)

He missed one: it's also a BrainF*ck program.
posted by sbutler at 10:21 AM on June 24, 2006

That's very silly.
posted by Alex404 at 10:37 AM on June 24, 2006

Just a clarification; several of the languages cited are not compiled languages; Perl, Python and PHP (for example) are interpreted languages. That is, they don't have to be compiled to be run.

Thanks. My inner geek feels better now ;->
posted by sporb at 11:03 AM on June 24, 2006

That is, they don't have to be compiled to be run.

To clarify, they could be compiled if desired (PHP, Python, Perl, etc.).
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:09 AM on June 24, 2006

Compiler?
posted by Captaintripps at 11:11 AM on June 24, 2006

Old news. In fact I've seen files that could run with something like 40 compilers, or execute directly as X86 machine code in DOS.
posted by delmoi at 11:16 AM on June 24, 2006

I've seen files that will shoot a compiler just for snoring too loud.
posted by Afroblanco at 11:36 AM on June 24, 2006

My favorite trick for getting a program to compile in Pascal and C--start it out like this:

(*x);

5 points to anyone who can guess what that does in C :)
posted by jewzilla at 11:42 AM on June 24, 2006

Actually, perl is a compiled language, it gets compiled first and then run, it's just that this happens every time you start the program unless you jump through lots of hoops.

</my inner geek is bigger than your inner geek>
posted by fvw at 12:06 PM on June 24, 2006

I actually tried poking around trying to figure out what you might do to make it work in javascript, but, ha. No.

Obviously what we need to do is make sure every major scripting language uses a different character for its comments!

And jewzilla, I have no idea, but you have to tell us now.
posted by blacklite at 12:11 PM on June 24, 2006

I tried to compile it with my old Visual Studio 2005 C++ compiler and it puked all over itself. :( (yes, I am in fact bored today)
posted by BillsR100 at 12:40 PM on June 24, 2006

jewzilla: Declares an int * variable x, but is only legal in K&R C, not ANSI or ISO C, yes?
posted by reventlov at 1:07 PM on June 24, 2006

reventlov: Right-o, though gcc lets it slide with a warning (unless you say -pedantic), so I say it still counts. No other way to do it, AFAIK.
posted by jewzilla at 2:12 PM on June 24, 2006

that's nothing. Chuck Norris could compile that code in pascal, c, c++, java, vb, .net, perl and python without a computer.
posted by Milliken at 2:36 PM on June 24, 2006

Someone want to explain how this works, and what it compiles to? My rudimentary knowledge is useless here...
posted by Orange Goblin at 2:45 PM on June 24, 2006

Someone want to explain how this works, and what it compiles to? My rudimentary knowledge is useless here...

You can see what it does in the blog post. When interpreted as C it outputs "I am a C program". When interpreted as perl it outputs "I am a perl program" (and so on). It uses lots of different method to hide the C code (and the PHP code and the TCL code etc) from the perl compiler, and vice versa.
posted by cillit bang at 3:29 PM on June 24, 2006

I still love this Perl / PostScript chimera.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:13 AM on June 25, 2006

Yes, it's a Polyglot. AFAIK, the first one was written by these folk.
posted by quiet at 10:14 AM on June 26, 2006