Programmer's Almanac: Dec 15th, 2006

On this day in 1994, the Dot.com boom started with the release of Netscape Navigator.

And, on this day in 2005, a distributed prime number program found the 43rd known Mersene prime. Mersene primes are powers of 2 minus 1. It's a big number: 2^30,402,457-1, which is 9,152,052 digits long. The 44th Mersene prime has been found since.

Finally, today in 1859, L.L Zamenhof was born. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, an artificial human language that doesn't have any of the worts of "evolved" languages. There are supposedly 2 million speakers around the world. In L.L.'s honor, here is "hello world" in Esperanto, written in C++, another invented (non-human) language:

#include 

int main()
{
 std::cout << "Saluton mondo!" << endl;
}

(c) 2006, Jorge Monasterio