While the King Lives: An Old C Programming Prank in GNU Hello from 1993
5 hours ago
- #GNU Hello
- #software nostalgia
- #C programming
- The author recalls waking up at night, sometimes pondering life's problems or upcoming tasks, other times revisiting forgotten bits of code like the line 'while the king lives' in C.
- This line compiles if macros redefine 'the', 'king', and 'lives' to expand to 'while 1', likely from an old joke program, possibly in IOCCC or USENET examples.
- It references GNU Hello, a program that prints 'Hello, world!', where the line appeared in version 1.3 (1993) as part of mail-reading code under the '--mail' flag, added in version 1.2.
- GNU Hello grew from 1,074 lines of code in 1993 to 38,798 lines in version 2.12.3 (2026), illustrating how simple programs can become complex, despite its core functionality.
- The 'King' was a contributor (email [email protected]) involved in GNU Hello and GNU Tar, but their identity remains mysterious; the mail feature and King's code were removed in version 2.6 (2010).