Code That Pushed the Language Envelope?

Lil Fritz asks: "Following on from the cool Flash Adventure game last week, this geezer Neil Pearce has written a full client side JavaScript CPU chess player (which drew with me, but then I'm papz at Chess). Now this sort of thing always amazes me. Doing stuff for which it was never intended. Do we have other warped (ie 'they wrote it in what?!?') uses of languages and tools?"

Comments

What about Duff's device?

[chrestomanci]

When I first saw it, I was amazed that it worked, but I would say it pushed the limits

Code example and discussion in the Jargon File

For a more detailed explation see here.

Can't post the code, due to Lameness filter.

Not too good

[Scarblac]

The site says it looks 2 moves deep, but I don't see how it can play like this then:

1.e4 Nc6 2.d4 Nf6 3.e5 Ne4 4.Bd3 Nxd4?? 5.Bxe4 Nxc2?? 6.Qxc2

Leaving two knights hanging to immediate capture threats, that doesn't suggest any lookahead to me.

But of course, it's neat that it works. People have made utilities for playing through chess games before, like PalView (a simple demo here).

Adapting that to take user input and a very simple lookahead is work, but not stunning in my opinion. Unless there's some reason why this is very hard in JS, I don't really do that language...

BaSiX

[ebbe11]

I think BaSiX ought to qualify - a BASIC interpreter written in TeX, no less.

Wolfenstein

['The '.$L3mm1ng]

Searching this page didn't show it up, so here's the link:

Wolfenstein in 5kb of JavaScript

Pushing the limits

[bobv-pillars-net]

I know a guy who wrote a program to calculate Pi to an arbitrary number of digits in

You ready for this?

DOS

He wrote the entire progeram as a series of .BAT files that recursively called each other.

No external programs, no tricks. Nothing but the native capabilities of COMMAND.COM. Local variables were stored in the environment, and globals were stored in files.

It ran really slow.