Paint and Perl

Amusing Research Project

Posted by David Van Loon on May 09, 2019

I recently discovered this amusing paper from Colin McMillen and Tim Toady in which they evaluate the existence of paint splatters that do not represent valid Perl programs.

Read the paper here.

The result seems to be mainly complicated by the fact that Perl supports unquoted strings, so many random strings will evaluate as constants when provided to the Perl interpreter.

Why? Who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Enjoy. 😊