But can we do more?

April 20, 2017 10:47 PM

On the Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SLYT)
posted by Chrysostom (12 comments total)

SIGBOVIK, previously.

The other fantastic paper this year was a C compiler that emitted programs entirely in ASCII-printable characters.
posted by The Notorious B.F.G. at 11:01 PM on April 20, 2017 [11 favorites]

:shudders:

Flagging as horrifying sin against God (of your choice) and Man...
posted by Samizdata at 1:15 AM on April 21, 2017

The other fantastic paper this year was a C compiler that emitted programs entirely in ASCII-printable characters.

I hadn't seen this before, and it is amazing.

I particularly liked the discussion of the sizeof() operator.
posted by aubilenon at 1:50 AM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wouldn't it be easier to assign an emoji to each unprintable character? Then all binaries would be printable.
posted by Obscure Reference at 4:44 AM on April 21, 2017

this was a beautiful execution! Quite impressed.
posted by rebent at 6:18 AM on April 21, 2017

Meaningful comparison can be achieved in the light of a previous FPP.
posted by runcifex at 6:39 AM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

> Wouldn't it be easier to assign an emoji to each unprintable character? Then all binaries would be printable.

Yeah, but if you take a compiled executable and replace the unprintable characters with emoji, it's no longer an executable file. In order to actually execute the file you'd need to translate the emoji back first.

The beauty of this is that the compiled executable just is a normal text file and an executable program at the same time.

You could open up the compiled binary in a text editor, print it out as a hard copy, scan it in on another machine, OCR the scanned images back into a text file and then run it as a program immediately with no additional translation step or conversion of any kind.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 7:42 AM on April 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Conclusion: "The iOS PowerPoint app violates the Apple's App Store Guidlines!!!"

Hilarious. I would like to subscribe to this newsletter.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 10:36 AM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

I discovered waaaay back at the start of my teaching career that PowerPoint can be used for everything in education: You want a card-sort activity? A sheet with multiple images/statements? PPT and print x-to-a-page. (It causes me physical pain to see trainees slicing up A4 sheets they've typed in Word.) You want image editing? You could wait 'till the IT bods have re-re-installed Photoshop, or... You want a display for the wall? You could swear at Publisher for a few hours, or... You want to store a series of lessons in a way that is quick, clear and esay to share? You want to be able to run VBA scripts that let you suck out text to help you compile vocabulary lists...

Everything about it is quick and dirty but it is almost always the tool that'll get the job done in an inevitably limited timeframe.
posted by stanf at 11:03 AM on April 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

I realise, that by posting the above, I have not only come out as tragically uncool but sacrificed any chance of ever wishing to be so.
posted by stanf at 11:06 AM on April 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

this rings SO true. Yikes!
posted by rebent at 12:29 PM on April 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

stanf, you took the most (?) maligned software in modern life and hacked it into a Swiss Army knife. How is that not the coolest?
posted by radicalawyer at 1:34 PM on April 21, 2017 [2 favorites]