[HN Gopher] Show HN: Smile - executable ASCII art (2011 remastered)
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Show HN: Smile - executable ASCII art (2011 remastered)
Author : pickledcods
Score : 15 points
Date : 2021-02-13 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jstrieb wrote:
| This is cool! It reminds me of a paper I read in 2017 in which
| the author creates a C89 compiler that compiles to printable
| ASCII by using similarly limited instructions.
|
| http://tom7.org/abc/
| pickledcods wrote:
| ASCII executables have been made in the past and use any
| displayable ASCII character. The difference with those is that
| this project is exclusively alphanumeric. To my knowledge that
| is a first.
| pickledcods wrote:
| Hi HN!
|
| When ASCII art is the executable....
|
| Executables consisting exclusively of alpha-numeric characters.
| The digits "0123456789" are used for dark, the letters
| "acemnorsuvwxz" for light.
|
| Removing instructions that are not alpha-numerical, strips
| functionality down to the minimum: - 4.5 of the 7
| registers available (%bx, %si, %di, %bp, %ah) - 4 of the
| ~80 instructions groups available (XOR,IMUL,CMP,Jcc) -
| constant values start from 48, (only range 0x30-0x39,0x61-0x79)
|
| By cosmic coincidence, the 2 instructions needed to jailbreak are
| available. On top of that, self-modifying code and radix13
| encoding.
|
| This should have been released a decade ago. As compensation, it
| has been remastered. The reward was making it 30% smaller.
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(page generated 2021-02-13 23:00 UTC)