This definition taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
HQ9+ is a joke programming language created by Cliff Biffle that consists of
only four commands , each represented by a single character:
H, Q, 9, and +. It is not Turing-complete, but it is highly efficient at
certain types of programs.
The H command prints out "Hello, world!"
The Q command prints out a copy of the source code of the program (i.e., it's a
quine).
The 9 command prints out the lyrics for 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall .
The + command increments the accumulator .
An example HQ9+ program would be: "HHQ+HQ++".
This program would output "Hello, world! Hello, world! HHQ+HQ++ Hello, world!
HHQ+HQ++" as well as incrementing the accumulator three times.
It is claimed that all useful programs written in HQ9+ run over twice as fast as
the same programs written in any other language.
Since no useful programs can be written in HQ9+, this is vacuously true.
HQ9+ is a joke; each command represents a common task that beginners are given
when learning to program, or that programmers give themselves when learning a
new programming language. A common exercise, for example, is to write a computer
program that prints "Hello, world!". There are some programming languages in
which this is actually quite difficult; however, in HQ9+ the task is elementary,
since the program "H" will accomplish the task. One of the hardest tasks in many
programming languages is to write a quine, that is, a program which prints its
own source code. However, in HQ9+, this is also trivial.
HQ9+ interpreters are extremely simple to write, so there have been many
written. For example, this HQ9+ interpreter was written (in Python ) in around
five minutes and is only 18 lines long. And, this HQ9+ compiler written in C
compiles HQ9+ programs to C code and is only about 40 lines long.
Since HQ9+ programs do not accept input, it is not possible to write an HQ9+
interpreter or compiler in HQ9+.
There is also another joke language called HQ9++ created by David Morgan-Mar, an
object-oriented language backward compatible with HQ9+.
This adds a new command, ++ , which increments the accumulator twice and
instantiates an object. Following the principle of information hiding, it is not
possible to access this object. |
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