93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019)

Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by zenincognito on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:38PM (#50459808)

The actual paper is also highly entertaining - https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by Amorymeltzer on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:55PM (#50460056)

In particular, I like "Figure − 3. − 3 ." as a good little easter egg.

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by 0xbadcafebee on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:11PM (#50460966)

[delayed]

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by xhrpost on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @08:47PM (#50461967)

So they might be valid older(<v5?) PHP scripts as well?

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by Izkata on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:19AM (#50463691)

PHP 5 had unquoted strings, and it looks like 7 did as well, but not 8.

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by asddubs on Thursday November 12, 2026 @08:24AM (#50466735)

They were deprecated in php 7, but did work

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by heresie-dabord on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @09:16PM (#50462231)

From the paper:

"An interesting thing about these images is that they’re not particularly Perl-specific; for example, the program shown in Figure −3 also evaluates as the number −3 in Python (and presumably several other programming languages.)"

We live in the age of Python, which I use every day. But I still also use Perl when it's the better tool for the job. And it often is!

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by comboy on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:25AM (#50464490)

For those who do not enjoy reading scientific papers this one is worth reading.

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