Hello world! Care to read your email?

Yes, this really is the classic program that prints “Hello, world!” when you run it. Unlike the elementary version often presented in books like K&R (The C Programming Language), GNU (GNU's Not Unix) hello processes its argument list to modify its behavior, supports internationalization [1], and includes a mail reader.

“hello - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation [2]”

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

“Law of Software Envelopment”

I didn't even realize GNU (GNU's Not Unix) [3] had a “Hello world” program available for downloading, much less one that succumbed to the Law of Software Envelopment. Granted, GNU then goes on to say:

The primary purpose of this program is to demonstrate how to write other programs that do these things; it serves as a model for all of the GNU coding standards [4].

It's quite amusing that GNU can turn this [5]:

#include 

main()
{
	printf("hello, world\n");
}

into a 400k compressed download, complete with its own configuration script, m4 macros (who uses m4 anymore?), man pages (and here I thought GNU was big on info pages) along with documentation in TeX [6], plus the various language files for Russian, Slovanian, Japanese and I even think English is included in there somewhere.

Quite amusing.

Note: technically, the code should be written as:

#include 
#include 

int main(void)
{
	printf("hello, world\n");
	return(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

to be fully ANSI (American National Standards Institute) compliant, but hey, who am I to argue with the authors of C?

Then again, if you really want to be anal retentive about it, then:

#include 
#include 

int main(void)
{
	(void)printf("hello, world\n");
	return(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

But that's just being silly …

=> [1] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_25.html#SEC25 | [2] http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/hello.html | [3] http://www.gnu.org/ | [4] http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html | [5] https://boston.conman.org/ | [6] http://www.tug.org/

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