Quadrilingual Crazy Programming

mtve writes: "Have you ever seen source code that is valid on four languages: Perl, C, Befunge, and BrainF*ck? During last Perlgolf season famous Perl hacker Jérôme Quelin submit such inconceivable masterpiece and now he published expanded explanation of his solution. Caution: that text can hurt your mental health. Play Perlgolf!"

Comments

If your brain is fucked, code in 4 languages?

[kiwipeso]

What sort of lunatic wants code that compiles in 4 languages, anyway?
Isn't it bad enough that microsoft creates gigabytes of code bloat, let alone all the geeks who are now going to try multi-lingual code?

i know it's silly...

[tps12]

Okay, obviously this is just a joke. Those are all toy languages that haven't been used in production level applications.

But think about what this means for more serious programming.

Imagine a program that runs in C++, MySQL, and Apache. This could be a new era in cross-platform development!

Programmers: please study this closely, and we will finally allow Linux to compete.

where's my O'Reilly book?

[WebMasterJoe]

I don't know if there's an official term for it, but I often write a function in one language that writes code for another language - for example, using PHP or Perl to write javascript. I've even gone so far as to use PHP to write a SQL statement which in turn is used to determine what will go in a Javascript function that writes HTML code. The example below is rather pointless, but I have come across real situations where it is beneficial to use that many languages together.

function hello() {
$q = "select * from helloworld where id=1;";
$connect = pg_pconnect("dbname=hw user=webber password=dipsh*t");
$cursor = pg_exec($connect, $query);
$r = pg_fetch_row($cur,0);
echo "<script>\n";
echo "function do_it() {\n\tdocument.write(\"".$r[0]."\");\n}\n";
echo "</script>";
}

That's three "real" languages and one markup language. And if you think that was crazy, think about this - I just had to write that in HTML in a slashdot posting textbox!

My next goal is to make the javascript write out HTML for parameters in a Java applet. And, the whole PHP page is going to be written by a C program exectuted by a cron job that was set up via a perl script (webmin!) That's eight different languages - perl -> bash (I think) -> C -> PHP -> SQL and Javascript -> HTML -> Java. Sadly, I don't think that's nearly as crazy as the quadrilingual program. I need to learn Brainf*ck.