Re: ASCII art from sourcecode as image

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Harry Mason wrote:
>
> Arthur J. O'Dwyer wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Harry Mason wrote:
> >> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> >> eval eval '"'.                          ('#').
> >>                                        '!'.'/' .('['
> ><snip most of very nice program>
> >
> > The OP has told me via e-mail that he really wants Java, of course.
> > So unfortunately the 'eval big_long_string' trick that I think is
> > at the root of EyeDrops' approach wouldn't work.
>
> Bear in mind that this is actually an obfuscator, not just a reformatter.
> You could achieve a similar effect in most languages, including Java, by
> creative use of white space, string concatenation, etc.

Certainly not in C or C++, and not in the vanilla beginner's Java I'm
familiar with.  They don't have any equivalent of "eval", unless you
build your own interpreter on top of everything. :)

> > Out of curiosity: Why *two* nested 'eval's at the start of this program?
>
> The inner "eval" constructs the text of the original program. You can see
> this if you replace the outer "eval" with "print":
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> use strict;
> print "hello, world\n";
>
> which is the original source code.

Aha.  [I certainly wouldn't've run that random Perl program on *my*
machine! ;-)]

> > And what does ('['^'.') mean?  0x5B^0x2E = 0x75 = 'u', or is there some
> > deeper magic at work here? :)
>
> ('['^'.') corresponds to the "u" in "use strict". Obfuscating is so much more
> effective if you don't use any alphanumerics in your source code. :)

Yeah - but does Perl specify ASCII?  And in a language where x is an
operator, I wasn't sure but that ^ meant something even weirder for
strings...

-Arthur

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