[COFF] Perl (was Re: forth on early unix)

[Paul Winalski via COFF]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 11:54 AM Lars Brinkhoff via COFF <coff at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> Dan Cross wrote:
> > Ori Kuttner wrote.
> >> FORTH is a Write Only Language, you write it and can't even read it
> >> yourself :-) I used to like FORTH, did some PostScript and now I just
> >> hate it.
> >
> > I thought that was Perl? (*jumps for the exit*)
>
> Y'all got nothing on TECO.
>
> When I worked at DEC (1980-2001) the engineering departments had a bunch
of VAX NOTES discussion forums on the corporate internal network.  One of
these was Trivia, which as the name implies was a place to pose trivia
questions/puzzles.  One question posted by Stan Rabinowitz was:

What do these three two-character sequences have in common? [followed by
three random-seeming sequences of two special characters]

The answer was that they are the only 2-printing-character sequences that
are not valid TECO commands.

-Paul W.