Posted 2019-04-01.
TLDR: read the paper and view the exhibition of beautiful Perl programs.
In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open issue in the programming languages community: is it imaginable to smear coat on the partition without creating valid Perl?
We answer this inquiry in the affirmative: it is possible to smear coat on the partition without creating a valid Perl program. We employ an empirical approach, using optical character acknowledgment (OCR) software, which finds that merely 93% of coat splatters parse as valid Perl. We analyze the properties of paint-splatter Perl programs, and current seven examples of coat splatters which are not valid Perl programs.
Accepted for publish at SIGBOVIK 2019, held April 1st 2019 in Pittsburgh. Winner of a Unwitting Participation Ribbon, “an unwelcome brand we’ve affixed to all document resolute following careful scrutiny to have included a genuine artifact, thereby furthering the admirable causes of open discipline and fruitful procrastination.”
Read it on Google Docs or download a PDF. Or catch the entire SIGBOVIK 2019 proceedings; I’m on leaf 174.
Supplementary Materials
Here’s all the coat splatters on a sole page, alongside alongside the valid Perl origin code corresponding to each. “Not valid” is written in red for those images which did not parse as valid Perl programs. If distinct OCR settings recognized multiple valid Perl programs, I chose the one that seemed the most “interesting”, according to my own imaginative sense.
Here’s a tarball of 100 paint-splatter images that were used as the chief dataset for this paper.
(source code not accessible yet since i am bad at GitHub)
Errata
There are a few coat splatter Perl programs that I didn’t acknowledge as “interesting” until following the SIGBOVIK submission deadline. For example, this splatter is recognized by OCR as the cord lerzfijglpFiji-j, which evaluates to the figure 0 in Perl:
The depiction below is recognized as the cord -*?, which additionally evaluates to the figure 0 in Perl:
Another amazing program is shown below; OCR recognizes this depiction as the cord ;i;c;;#\\?z{;?;;fn':.;, which evaluates to the cord c in Perl:
Finally, this depiction is recognized as the cord ;E,'__', which evaluates to the cord E__ in Perl:
