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A comment on 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019).

Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by brisket_bronson on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:49PM (#50460726)
Figure 6 represents the string “gggijgziifiiffif”, which by pure coincidence happens to accurately represent the authors’ verbal reaction upon learning that “unquoted strings” were a feature intentionally included in the Perl language
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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by lta on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @06:59PM (#50460851)
I'm afraid I have to tell you you lack the soul of a poet to truly appreciate the brilliant design . Perl is magic (like litteraly). I'm fairly sure it's one of the untold inspiration of the Harry Potter books
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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by hluska on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:12PM (#50460984)
I really dig your whimsy.
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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by bitwize on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:15PM (#50461018)
necronomicon, maybe
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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by tomaskafka on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @07:47PM (#50461370)
This is also a valid Perl program (I bet)
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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by omoikane on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @09:56PM (#50462491)
There is a gem in the footnote right below gggijgziifiiffif, where it says it's possible to make a perl error quine by writing this line to the right location:

    Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.
I just tried this with perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.

See also: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/48394

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by toast0 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @02:18AM (#50464046)
> I just tried this perl 5.42.0, and any file name starting with a '/' will work.

any file name? How about /1

?

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Re:93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs (2019) by larsonian on Thursday November 12, 2026 @08:27AM (#50466777)
Unquoted strings are the default in shell languages, and one of the design goals of Perl was to be a more powerful replacement for shell scripts. It's not a particularly surprising feature, really.

For anything more complex than a one-off script, Perl is pretty much always written with `use strict`, which disables unquoted strings and certain other (mis)features.

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