<>
These are angle brackets
ᐸᐳ
These are Canadian Aboriginal Syntax Blocks
this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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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.
Mines like yours too.
That's the classic Japanese font also used in many Nintendo games like Wii sports, right?
Yes, upper case angle brackets.
Corporate needs you to find....
There's room for my mom and your mom in programming.
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 🤔
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.
In C and C++, the source character set is implementation defined. This means that each compiler sets its own rules about what characters are accepted. For example compilers could choose to accept ASCII or EBCDIC or Unicode, or some combination, etc.
So the ISO standard will say that ; character is the end of statement punctuation. But it is up to the compiler to say which character(s) or code point(s) represent the ISO ;.
The ISO standards also require compilers to define a separate execution character set to specify values that can be stored in char and used with the string library functions. The execution character set doesn't have to be the same as the source character set.
Edit: I should also mention that the rules for this stuff are changing a lot in ISO C23 and C++23. (Which standards I haven't yet personally adopted.) Basically the ISO 23 standards mandate compilers to support UTF-8 source files, and they map every source character in the ISO standard to its corresponding Unicode character.
Mhh today I learned. That's wild. I would have thought that any sane person would allow only 7-bit ASCII for the source code, and forward-compatible character sets in strings (every standard iteration being allowed to add characters, but not remove them).
At the time that C was designed, ASCII was not a universal standard. It was one encoding competing with other encodings.
Ok that's a fair point I had overlooked. Thanks for explaining.
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 :(
I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.
"Both" is also acceptable.
Yes.
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.
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.
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:
Uncaffeinated needs Lisp in their life. The programming language doesn't have a feature you need? Implement it yourself 👍
Things to remember if you ever enter an obfuscated code competition.
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.
You make that sound like a bad thing
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.
;;;;;;;;
Imagine reinventing preprocessor macros in go...