Comment by susam
4 years ago
There is a similar joke in the book Learning Perl, 3rd Edition by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix. I wrote a post about it here fourteen years ago: https://susam.net/blog/from-perl-to-pi.html . Quoting from the book:
"It's easier to type $pi than 𝜋, especially if you don't have Unicode. And it will be easy to maintain the program in case the value of ever changes."
There is also a comment by Randal Schwartz in the comments section where he credits Tom Phoenix with that particular bit of humour.
Good catch! I might be misremembering this event and it was actually Perl, not C. I see Learning Perl, 3rd Edition was published in 2001, which does put its publication at about the right time in early 00s.