Comment by Stratoscope
6 years ago
You don't really have to use code blocks for that. Here's a copy that will be readable on mobile and preserves the formatting from the original (which the code block didn't):
Q: How did the IOCCC get started?
A: One day (23 March 1984 to be exact), back Larry Bassel and I (Landon Curt Noll) were working for National Semiconductor's Genix porting group, we were both in our offices trying to fix some very broken code. Larry had been trying to fix a bug in the classic Bourne shell (C code #defined to death to sort of look like Algol) and I had been working on the finger program from early BSD (a bug ridden finger implementation to be sure). We happened to both wander (at the same time) out to the hallway in Building 7C to clear our heads.
We began to compare notes: "You won't believe the code I am trying to fix". And: "Well you cannot imagine the brain damage level of the code I'm trying to fix". As well as: "It more than bad code, the author really had to try to make it this bad!".
After a few minutes we wandered back into my office where I posted a flame to net.lang.c inviting people to try and out obfuscate the UN*X source code we had just been working on.
I tried it without, initially.
How'd you get the censored UNIX to work without italicizing half of the comment incorrectly? I tried escaping it in a few different ways, and no dice.
That must have been sheer luck! Or maybe because it was the last asterisk in the comment, and the ones before it were paired?
I took the original and replaced the doubled single quotes with regular double quotes, and surrounded the italicized quotes with asterisks. That seemed to do the trick.
Of course if the censored UNIX appeared earlier, or more than once, that would likely be a problem. Here are three of them in a row:
UNX UNX UN*X
Here's another idea. I suspect that the other Unicode asterisk-like characters might render without triggering italics. I'll use the asterisk operator (U+2217), heavy asterisk (U+2731), bold five spoked asterisk (U+1F7B1) in that order. Let's see how they look:
UN∗X UNX UN🞱X
OK, it looks like the heavy asterisk just disappears, bold five spoke is too big in Chrome on Windows and a box with an X in it in Chrome on Android, but the asterisk operator is a pretty good substitute for the regular one (albeit a bit small and light on desktop, a bit large on mobile). Now let's see if repeating it triggers any formatting:
UN∗X UN∗X UN∗X
I think we have a winner! Ah, the joys of HN comment formatting...