• Dark-Star88 (unregistered)

    "Count your semicolons" -original, with apologies

    ♬When the lines of code you write prevent job loss...♬ ♬And you're getting nervous what to show your boss...♬ ♬Count some semicolons, they'll increase your lines...♬ ♬And then your performance will review just fine!♬ (chorus) ♬Count your semicolons, name them one by one...♬ ♬Count your semicolons, then commit and run...♬ ♬Count your semicolons, name them one by one...♬ ♬Count your semicolons, and then call it done!...♬

    ♬If you're staying past the time you should clock off...♬ ♬And you're so exhausted and the code is rough...♬ ♬Add some semicolons, no one else will know...♬ ♬Then you can commit and get yourself right home!♬

    (chorus)

    ♬Semicolons are your friend, for thus you see...♬ ♬When it's simply lines of code that you do need...♬ ♬Add them by the pages, they don't cost at all...♬ ♬Add them 'till your code's a white and dotted wall!♬

    (chorus)

  • mz6lu (unregistered) in reply to Alex

    or, some sort of horrible line-based source transformation.

  • David K (unregistered) in reply to jp00p

    Yes, I believe the technique is known as security-by-OMG-I-can't-scroll-anymore.

  • Ross (unregistered)

    Oh well, there goes the neighborhood. Somebody can defeat the new reCAPTCHA.

    To Remy: this cornifcation is worse than no cornification at all. How the hell am I supposed to find the two semicolons in a line of thirty thousand that I can click on?

    To the one who asked about cornification: view source of the article and search for "cornify.js"

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to John

    My guess is that it was trying to overcome the idiotic restriction of MS-IE refusing to serve a web page smaller than 512 characters,

    If you're serving web pages from MS-IE, this code is not the first of your problems.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Hey all... so... I can't present proof, but I am THE Chris from this article.

    Upon further investigation, I determined that this and other magical shit in the codebase are probably the result of undergraduate students using Microsoft Word 2003 to write and "Save as HTML" a big portion of our codebase.

    This particular snip is just one function in a huge, huge, huge PHP file. The entire repository (of just code, not static content) is around 1 GB. It's absolute insanity, and I have put in my resignation.

  • (nodebb)

    I know JavaScript has Automatic Semicolon Insertion but this is ridiculous!

  • MrRobot (unregistered)

    I am not a robot. But someone else clearly is. What a pity :(

  • Peter Wolff (unregistered)

    I'm a bit lazy. Can someone please translate the Whitespace parts into Brainfuck?

  • Axel (unregistered) in reply to Dark-Star88

    +1 for the song.

    I didn't pick up on the tune until the chorus. For those still wondering, it's an old hymn called "Count Your Many Blessings."

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