Subject: Wikipedia Musings

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:35:32 +0300

One day I was searching for the list of computer languages on Google to see
if a name I thought of for a programming language was already taken. I came 
across Wikipedia's list of them:

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

Which has an alphabetical list:

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

Now on the Alphabetical list, I found a link to the list of BASIC dialects:

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

This list is extremely long and exhaustive.

Another list I found is the list of estoric programming languages:

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

Where I found Var'aq, which is a programming language written in Klingon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Var'aq

One of the categories the latter belonged to was the Non-English-based 
programming languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Non-English-based_programming_languages

Now, this time I found an omission: Bsisith, a dialect of BASIC written in
Hebrew. So I added it:

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

I also added it to some categories and to the list of BASIC dialects. It's
still a very short article, as I have little information about it, so if
anyone of you know more about Bsisith, please add more information there.

The English Wikipedia has a long article about BASIC:

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

The Hebrew version, OTOH is just a short stub:

http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

Due to the nostalgic feelings I have for BASIC, I'd like to translate sections
from English to the Hebrew article, but naturally could use some help. (I
already translated some sections about Perl).

On the IRC I was told that someone recalled a version of BASIC written using
the Cyrillic alphabet, with keywords in Russian. I could not find it in 
Wikipedia, so if anyone has more information about it, please fill it in 
there.

---------

While I was in the neighbourhood, I checked the Perl page and stumbled upon
a page about Perl's JAPHs:

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

JAPHs are Perl programs that print "Just another Perl hacker" in various
clever ways. One can find there a JAPH that is composed entirely of letters
and whitespace:

<<<<<<<<<
not exp log srand xor s qq qx xor
 s x x length uc ord and print chr
 ord for qw q join use sub tied qx
 xor eval xor print qq q q xor int
 eval lc q m cos and print chr ord
 for qw y abs ne open tied hex exp
 ref y m xor scalar srand print qq
 q q xor int eval lc qq y sqrt cos
 and print chr ord for qw x printf
 each return local x y or print qq
 s s and eval q s undef or oct xor
 time xor ref print chr int ord lc
 foreach qw y hex alarm chdir kill
 exec return y s gt sin sort split

And a JAPH that only uses punctuation:

<<<<<<<<
`$=`;$_=\%!;($_)=/(.)/;$==++$|;($.,$/,$,,$\,$",$;,$^,$#,$~,$*,$:,@%)=(
$!=~/(.)(.).(.)(.)(.)(.)..(.)(.)(.)..(.)......(.)/,$"),$=++;$.++;$.++;
$_++;$_++;($_,$\,$,)=($~.$"."$;$/$%[$?]$_$\$,$:$%[$?]",$"&$~,$#,);$,++
;$,++;$^|=$";`$_$\$,$/$:$;$~$*$%[$?]$.$~$*${#}$%[$?]$;$\$"$^$~$*.>&$=`

Isn't Perl a wonderful language? ;-)

I don't understand them but they both work.

---------

I also found a page about FUBAR:

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

It points to SNAFU:

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

Which in turn contains a list of other Army acronyms including my favourite
"DILLIGAD" (= "Do I look like I give a damn?").

Enjoy!

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
bottom 5%.