this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Programming

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Reverse-engineering Prose From Internet Lingo (aartaka.me)
submitted 10 hours ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to c/programming@programming.dev
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Internet learned to speak gibberish that doesn’t always coincide with literary text. But it can be converted back to that. Here’s my experiment along these lines.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 7 hours ago

But Lisp is case-insensitive

looks bemused

I don't do that much Lisp, mostly use it for emacs, but I'm pretty sure that it's not.

opens emacs

(setq foo 1)                                                                                                                                                    
(print foo)                                                                                                                                                     

1

OK. So far so good.

(setq foo 1)                                                                                                                                                    
(print FOO)                                                                                                                                                     

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable FOO)
  (print FOO)
  (progn (print FOO))
  eval((progn (print FOO)) t)
  elisp--eval-last-sexp(nil)
  #f(compiled-function () #<bytecode 0xf6febdfec01a>)()
  eval-last-sexp(nil)
  funcall-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil)
      command-execute(eval-last-sexp)

Elisp sure doesn't look to be case-insensitive. Maybe he meant some specific variant? Common Lisp?

$ sudo apt install sbcl

Apparently sbcl's REPL doesn't support readline.

$ sudo apt install rlwrap
$ rlwrap sbcl

Huh. Looks like with readline, I also get cursor flashing to do paren matching, kinda like emacs can do. I had no idea that readline could do that. Apparently Common Lisp doesn't do setq either.

more experimentation

* (let ((foo 1)) (print FOO))

1 
1

Huh. So, yeah, I guess that Common Lisp is case-insensitive. That is a bit wild. I guess I do remember vaguely seeing old Lisp stuff with keywords in all-caps.

Is Scheme?

$ sudo apt install guile-3.0

Apparently the guile REPL doesn't support readline either. God.

$ rlwrap guile

And it looks like "print" is "display" in Scheme-land.

scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display foo))
1

Okay, so that's the syntax. Case-insensitive?

scheme@(guile-user)> (let ((foo 1)) (display FOO))
;;; <stdin>:2:24: warning: possibly unbound variable `FOO'
ice-9/boot-9.scm:1676:22: In procedure raise-exception:
Unbound variable: FOO

Nope.

I kinda feel like there are Lisps that the author could have used if they wanted Lisp and case-sensitivity, if that was the major irritation.