> This post was inspired by another post about exactly the same thing. I couldn't find it when I looked for it, so I wrote this. All credit to the original author for noticing how interesting this rabbit hole is.
I think the author may be thinking of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
Although that presentation does point out that the technique is more generally used in quines. Given that there is a fair amount of research, papers and commentary on quines, it's possible that the author may have read something along those lines.
I remember a similar article for some C compiler, and it turned out the only place the value 0x10 appeared was in the compiler binary, because in the source code it had something like "\\n" -> "\n"
The incorrect capitalization made me think that, perhaps, there's a scarcely known escape sequence \N that is different from \n. Maybe it matches any character that isn't a newline? Nope, just small caps in the original article.
> This post was inspired by another post about exactly the same thing. I couldn't find it when I looked for it, so I wrote this. All credit to the original author for noticing how interesting this rabbit hole is.
I think the author may be thinking of Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
Although that presentation does point out that the technique is more generally used in quines. Given that there is a fair amount of research, papers and commentary on quines, it's possible that the author may have read something along those lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
[delayed]
if only this went into where the ocaml escape came from :)
It does, it links to this: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/4d6ecfb5cf4a5da814784dee...
I remember a similar article for some C compiler, and it turned out the only place the value 0x10 appeared was in the compiler binary, because in the source code it had something like "\\n" -> "\n"
The incorrect capitalization made me think that, perhaps, there's a scarcely known escape sequence \N that is different from \n. Maybe it matches any character that isn't a newline? Nope, just small caps in the original article.
If you do view source, it’s actually \n, but it gets transformed to uppercase because of this CSS rule:
So, the HN title is wrong.
The original title is.
There is actually.
Many systems use \N in CSVs or similar as NULL, to distinguish from an empty string.
I figured this is what the article was about?
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41564527