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Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

I want to run it, but do I have anything to fear? "Black Perl" suggests it's going to do some bad stuff to my box.

"perl -c" checks syntax without executing. (Try it and you'll see a lot of syntax errors using perl 5, so no chance of it executing -- but even if you run it under perl 3, you have nothing to fear.)

Careful with that. perl -c still runs the BEGIN blocks so don't rely on it for safety (ie. if you're handling untrusted code).

Haha, I don't think this script does much on a machine. It is designed to be interpreted by humans though.

No, the whole point is that this run on Perl 3. It's valid code.

Yeah, I get that it's valid Perl code, but it doesn't cause the computer to do something, or give an interesting output. A human can read it and find it interesting. I tried to say that in a witty way. Oh well...

So what if it doesn't do anything?

It not doing anything isn't the point. The point is that it's technically valid code, but is still relevant to human interpretation.

This was the point I was trying to make.

It not doing anything matters - generally, code poetry is something that does do something interesting while being relevant to human interpretation; so code that simply validates syntactically isn't that amazing.

Well, he's answering @bmmayer1's question. It does not do anything, so it is safe to run on your computer.

The commenter isn't putting it down for that, just explaining he'd be surprised if it did anything let alone something mischievous.

Oh man, imagine a poem like this that outputted something relevant to the theme of the poem. That'd be amazing.

C'mon man, this is Perl. Easy things are easy, Hard things are possible.

In reverse:

https://gist.github.com/justingit/6533386

omg, just ran that in perl. epic.

https://metacpan.org/module/Acme::EyeDrops

I remember this -- I swear this was in one of the Perl books (the Camel book?) way back when.

It's valid Perl 3, but it is not supposed to do anything useful. The idea is simply to show how expressive you could be in the language.

It is in my edition of the camel.

Most of the discussion on Perl Poetry in the Camel Book is by way of inclusion of this Usenet post: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/news.groups/qSO-Q0rxg_E/RrRn...

I don't understand what you mean by 'expressive' in this sentence: if it's not to make the program do something specific, you could just wrap everything in a comment block and be as 'expressive' as you like in any language.

I elaborated on actual expressiveness here:

http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/pizza-snakes-bicycle/

(which post starts by quoting the Black Perl to put you in the mood :)

Bob Howard will come and get you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Archives

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