Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have you ever tried certain psychedelics to solve complex problems?

news.ycombinator.com

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever tried certain psychedelics to solve complex problems?

#21

a nameless colleague once claimed all his most critical code was written while high on LSD. A self-taught physicist turned programmer who first learned Pascal, his C files included a header file that #define(d) "Begin" as "{" and "End" as "}".

Could you explain the last part? Are we talking about the inception of braces in programming?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever tried certain psychedelics to solve complex problems?

#22
post #21

a nameless colleague once claimed all his most critical code was written while high on LSD. A self-taught physicist turned programmer who first learned Pascal, his C files included a header file that #define(d) "Begin" as "{" and "End" as "}".

Could you explain the last part? Are we talking about the inception of braces in programming?

He was porting his Pascal code to C, but wanted to keep writing things like

    helloWorld()
    Begin
        printf("hello world!");
    End
so he added these preprocessor lines:

    #define Begin {
    #define End }
Post reply on HN