What is it?
Polyglot is a computer program in eight languages. You compile it with your favorite compiler and run it. It says:
10th Anniversary Edition
Polyglot turned 10 years old in February 2001. Kev thought it needed an update, so he added perl, and fixed the x86 machine language to work with Win32.
We felt pretty smug about getting another language in there, so we thought we'd submit it to the
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Months later, when the results were finally announced, we failed to get a mention.
History
A long time ago (1990) some people were talking about polyglot programs in
rec.puzzles.
A couple of programs were posted that worked in two or three languages, and we
thought that was pretty cool.
We thought we'd have a go, and wrote our own. It was fun. Some time later, we
posted it back to the newsgroup. And later still, we put up this web page (http://ideology.com.au/polyglot)
.
Copying Polyglot
We have had a couple of enquiries about copying polyglot and including it in various Linux distributions.
Polyglot is in the public domain. You are free to do as you please with it. If you do use it, an acknowledgement would be nice.
The authors are Kevin Bungard, Peter Lisle, and Chris Tham.
You can contact them here. Thanks goes to George Janczuk.