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Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

Tom Murphy VII (tom7) did such a thing. It's a partial C89 compiler that outputs only printable characters. In meta fashion, the compiler is compiled by itself to also contain only printable characters. The TXT and EXE files below are exactly the same.

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA

Paper (PDF): http://tom7.org/abc/paper.pdf

Paper (TXT): http://tom7.org/abc/paper.txt

Compiler (EXE): http://tom7.org/abc/paper.exe

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Yes, like many others. That's why I upped the ante by stating "numeric and lowercase characters only". And with the glyph differences between them also create a "hidden" image.

Editted: What you reference to is a compiler and something completely different.

Not completely different, because the output of the compiler is itself ASCII. So it compiles any C program into an ASCII exe

Both projects stem from the same root, TXT=EXE. However, both branch in totally different directions. One says "any printable goes" whereas the other says "only the smallest subset (preferably also for ASCII art) goes", mainly being being “0123456789acemnorsuvwxz”.

These are two different projects with different design goals and challenges. Tom's built a compiler around it, I created a bootloader that consists of only MUL and XOR.

I don't understand why I feel that I have to defend myself, I thought hackers love these kind of projects, yet it seems I got cancelled.

A true innovation would be to combine both projects. One that inputs source code plus an image and outputs ASCII art that runs like a program.

>yet it seems I got cancelled.

Holy hyperbole captain. Apparently not being heaped in praise and getting the usual amount of hyper cynical HN criticism is "being cancelled" now.

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