In 1974, Gustav Larsson, a young programmer from Helsinki,
Finland, stumbled upon an amazing discovery. While working
with a PDP-8 mainframe computer, Gustav suddenly because
bored. He decided to attempt to compile a single byte
program. For what reasons we cannot know.

Nevertheless, Gustav was already familiar with RTPS FORTRAN
and thus picked a single character to represent the
contents of the program: "@". Once compiled, he expected
nothing to happen.

He was wrong. To his absolute amazement, it compiled
successfully!

Using an ARS-33 Teletype, Gustav printed out the 1 byte program
followed by its output. It appeared to contain a message from
God. A devout Catholic, Gustav showed it to his immediate
supervisor, who ordered both the print out and the program
itself destroyed. Although Gustav complied with his wishes,
it is rumored that he kept a copy of the printout in a small
shoe box in his apartment in Helsinki.

He also kept a brown diary which included various small
passages from the "Helsinki Code" (as he described it years
later). According to Gustav, the Helsinki Code came directly
from the 'Mind of God.'

The Helsinki Code read (in part):

"...[M]y presence in your world is unalterable for I am the
sanctuary of both the cosmos and the one soul inside you. I
could awaken each of you in this very moment to [my] unity,
but there is a larger design - a more comprehensive vision -
that places you in the boundaries of time and the spatial
dimensions of separateness...[T]he design requires a
progression into my wholeness that reacquaints you with
[my] unity through the experience of separation. Your
awakening, while slow and sometimes painful, is assured,
and this you must trust above all else..."

(Page 26 of Gustav's Journal - Dated February 10th, 1975)

Gustav passed away in 1996. Although his diary has since
turned up missing, the above fragment from the 'Helsinki
Code' remains. Perhaps, just perhaps, we can learn to
be better people simply by reading it.

Paul

dunric@yahoo.com wrote:
Almost certainly not from God. It most probably, very likely, almost
certainly, definitely came from the compiler writer. If Gustav decides
to call him god then be it. But the compiler writer is certainly human.

By the way, historically that is not the shortest piece of source code
ever written. Some time ago someone submitted a zero byte C source code
(an empty file) to the obfuscated C contest. Amazingly gcc recognised
it as a valid and legal C source code and compiled it into an
executable. The program, when run, outputs nothing. Thus it also claims
to be the shortest quine (self reproducing code) in history by printing
out itself (nothing). It actually won the competition. After that, the
obfuscated C contest banned all zero byte source code.

slebetman@yahoo.com wrote:
Right. It sounds like the Devil to me.

dunric@yahoo.com wrote:

The PDP-8 is a twelve bit machine. Do you mean a 1.5 byte
program?

The PDP-11 has a one instruction program which can be used
to test all of memory.

-- glen

slebetman@yahoo.com said:

The best entries are the ones that result in a rule change. :-)

Incidentally, null files are nothing particularly new - they've been used as
flags many a time.

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29/7/1999
http://www.cpax.org.uk
email: rjh at above domain (but drop the www, obviously)

slebetman@yahoo.com wrote:
All? How many can there be

Richard Heathfield wrote:

(snip)

I remember having a comment after the END statement of a Fortran
program, which results in various error messages, such as missing END
statement, and maybe some about no executable statements. It might also
generate an extra MAIN, confusing things somewhat.

-- glen

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:30:22 +1100, Russell Shaw
<rjshawN_o@s_pam.netspace.net.au> wrote in comp.programming:

How about...

....zero byte ASCII programs

....zero byte EBCDIC programs

....zero byte Unicode programs

....zero byte K&R programs

....zero byte C89 programs

....zero byte C99 programs -- wouldn't work anyway, lack of fully C99
conforming compilers.

In alt.folklore.computers slebetman@yahoo.com <slebetman@gmail.com> wrot
Too bad you can't do that anymore just for giggles. Do you remember the
hardware, OS, and compiler used? It still works with Perl.

zaphod:/tmp$ touch foo.c
zaphod:/tmp$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.3.3 (NetBSD nb3 20040520)
Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

zaphod:/tmp$ gcc -o foo foo.c
/usr/lib/crt0.o(.text+0x86): In function `___start':
: undefined reference to `main'
zaphod:/tmp$

--
David Griffith
dgriffi@cs.csbuak.edu <-- Switch the 'b' and 'u'

....becuase his smart-ass friend bet him he couldn't; not because he
wanted to challenge Gustav's programming skills, but because he
replaced the FORTRAN compiler, with a seemingly innocent, but very
special, FORTRAN compiler that he had wrote. Of course, he had just
added code to the current FORTRAN compiler so that it would compile
single byte's each which when compiled and run would produce special
output. Coincidently, Gustav first attempted to compile an "@", which
produced his output from "God." However, if he hadn't gotten so excited
about this, he would have realized that compiling certain other
single-byte characters would have produced additional prophetic output
as well. Some of these are described below:

Char - "Description"
@ - A message from "God" (exact message not repeated here)
$ - A message from "Satan" (exact message not repeated here)
! - "u r teh suck!!!1!!1"
& - "All your base are belong to us"
< - "nerf the PDP-8"
? - "42"

[yeah, sorry. I was bored.]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 05:29:42 +0000 (UTC)
Richard Heathfield <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Indeed /bin/true on UNIX systems is often an empty file or
sometimes a file full of comments.

--
C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays
The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun
You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see
| http://www.sohara.org/

Richard Heathfield writes:

That happened in high school physics class. We had a competition of
building bridges out of nothing more than balsa wood and Elmer's glue.
They were graded on two factors: (a) design (by a local architecture
firm) and (b) how much weight they would hold in the school's annual
bridge crushing. One person decided to coat each piece of balsa wood
in Elmer's glue, rather than simply using it to join pieces together.
His bridge held several times more weight than anybody else's,
resulting in the rule change.

dunric@yahoo.com wrote:
Reminds me of a story I heard many years ago...

A certain university computing facility (I think this was in the days
when you submitted a deck of punched cards, and received your output
the following day) decided to write a compiler that would attempt to
guess what the students meant to write, and correct the code as it
thought fit.
So someone decided to submit the first chapter of Genesis - and it
compiled.

Dave Flower

In article <1134362645.916762.143340@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
slebetman@yahoo.com <slebetman@gmail.com> wrote:
Then that programmer must have been a Bit God. Or very possibly
a Byte God. The program was, after all, a whole byte.

-- mrr

"glen herrmannsfeldt" <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote in message
news:vtWdnUBSSJRflQDeRVn-rQ@comcast.com...
is 'octet'.

Regards,

Mike Metcalf

Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> writes:

The ferpect program! :-)

But it cheats because it relies on a shell interpreter.

Previously, the shortest that I encountered was simply "I"; being
equivalent to SVCA-11 (supervisor call A number 11) on AMOS. The
program simply exited.

That is a directly-executing, stand-alone program so it doesn't
cheat.
--
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign | Economist \E*con"o*mist\, n.
X against HTML mail | One with a ready explanation as to why
/ \ and postings | his last prediction was so wrong

In article <egev63-084.ln1@main.anatron.com.au>,
Russell Shaw <rjshawN_o@s_pam.netspace.net.au> writes:
He should have patented it, then he could charge outrageous licensing
fees to anyone found to have a zero-length file on their system.

<dunric@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1134358062.550739.108660@f14g2000cwb.googlegr oups.com...
mainframe computer. In point of fact, it was the very first minicomputer.
Jim

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 22:06:51 +0800
Bernd Felsche <bernie@innovative.iinet.net.au> wrote:

And yet the last time I looked at it on a Sun box it was
version 1.5 - I just hope the commit messages don't say "Bug fix".

Well yes.

On CP/M the one byte program RST 0 (0xC7) would do exactly that.

--
C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays
The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun
You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see
| http://www.sohara.org/

In article <1134362645.916762.143340@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups .com>,
slebetman@gmail.com says...

Surely a zero-byte program is ineligible anyway, as it is not
obfuscated in any way?

- Gerry Quinn