Things to remember if you ever enter an obfuscated code competition.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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<>
These are angle brackets
ᐸᐳ
These are Canadian Aboriginal Syntax Blocks
Most compilers tell you what's up these days, but
;
Greek question mark
;
Semicolon
mm our font renders them basically the same hehe
screenshot:
It looks like this for me. Granted I'm on Piefed so that's probably part of the reason.
Corporate needs you to find....
There's room for my mom and your mom in programming.
Uncaffeinated needs Lisp in their life. The programming language doesn't have a feature you need? Implement it yourself 👍
Doesn't go actually have generics?
Didn't have them nine years ago. Let alone three (?).
That’s the problem with the internet, it has no memory.
I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.
"Both" is also acceptable.
Yes.
Unicode truly is amazing.
Like that fake apple site that uses the Cyrillic A instead of the Latin A.
Or the Greek question mark being a different code to Latin question marks.
Greek-Latin question marks
Actually the Greek question mark (;) looks like the Latin semi-colon (;)!
Last time I looked it up I think I found they are the same characters, and I tried compiling C with a Greek question mark instead of a semi-colon and it compiled fine! But I'm curious if it was because of something else, like my computer's keyboard layout, or the compiler simply being able to handle them 🤔
Wait, does C read like valley girl speech in Greek?
Shit - the next five weeks I'll read C++ lines in upspeak in my head :(
Something somewhere was definitely doing the conversion for you, but it could have been your editor, the compiler or something in between like a C preprocessor directive getting loaded in by your configuration.
I'd be pissed if it was my editor. A compiler used on a global scale would make sense.
Nah, I would absolutely want my compiler to error out hard on characters that are not allowed per the standard.
My old job legitimately did this in C++ with a Perl script because we had to be able to build on some weird, old systems and couldn't use C++ templates.
I had to start reading that three times over, because I saw they mentioned "Canadian" and just assumed the angle brackets are a joke in reference to the Canadians in South Park:
The OOP goons eventually won and Go added generics a few years back.
Generics aren't really OOP, OOP tends to use run time dynamic dispatch through inheritance. Generics come from functional programming type constructors.
You're thinking of architecture astronauts when talking about generics. The biggest win of the object-oriented folks was to get a garbage collector included by default; compare and contrast with Rust, which ended up not having garbage collection.
It's fucking genius
They were too preoccupied with whether they could instead of asking whether they should.
I wonder if you could write a valid program in two different languages using this technique.
You can do it with any language where whitespace doesn't matter and Whitespace
That's what I use to show people the exact message I sent before. It gets around any app that doesn't let you send blank messages. I have it saved on my clipboard for this
Absolutely, that's a polyglot file
Not quite this exact case but I love showing people https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
It has 128 languages, it starts with ruby which prints out its own source code in Scala, then the Scala program executes to generate the next source code, repeat for 128 languages and eventually returns to the original ruby code.
For extra fun, look at the source code on a large monitor.
amazing! it's great to see that is still being maintained after so many years.
;;;;;;;;