[COFF] On having a slash

Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Tue Apr 14 00:23:49 AEST 2020


On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 8:22 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen at firemail.de>
wrote:

> 'Since the 1/l and 0/O were displayed
> identically, the programmers didn't find the prank funny.  Our
> instructor said as he traveled the US training groups, he hoped he would
> find the guy.  10 or 15 years later he was still more than a tad angry.
> All for lack of slashes and serifs.'
>
> the 1/l/i confusion was a real problem in those days when I saw numberless
> frustrated programmers whose programs did anything but the expected.
>

There's many obfuscation tools for 'C' that existed back in the day which
did the above automatically. I've had the displeasure to debug code run
through that for which the original source has been lost...  "Pleasure" ...
right. I'll go with that since this is still polite company.

Warner
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