Mark Dominus

#beethoven on hearing a report that a violinist complained one of his string quartets was too hard to play:

"Does he really believe that I think about his silly fiddle when the muse strikes me to compose?"

Update: I haven't been able to verify this, and Claude plausibly opines that it is unverifiable: https://claude.ai/share/762f177a-580e-48d4-833b-08e32417aae9

I thought this probably wouldn't work with recent Perls, but i tried it with 5.38.2 just now and was delighted to find out that it does run correctly!

I was sure that Perl had deprecated the `"\c8"` escape long ago. This asks Perl to construct a string containing the character control-8.

(There is no such character as control-8.)

But it did do _something_, and my program depends on it doing that thing. Which it still does! Thanks p5p for retaining this crucial backward-compatibility feature.

Philippe Bruhat brought to my attention that someone is selling shirts on Redbubble with my prizewinning obfuscated Perl program. (This is not a complaint.) Unfortunately the code is illegible in the catalog pictures.

Here it is though:

@p=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*=2)+=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&<$_>}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

(It fits exactly into four lines of 77 characters each, perfect for a Usenet signature…)

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Just-Perl-things-by-sa1x/55822417/lrcw.XYZ

Typo of the day:

“Cod review”.