Programmer's Almanac: Jan 10th, 2007

Today, in 1938, computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was born. He is best known for writing The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP) , which was named one of the twelve best science/physics monographs of the 20th century.

Currently volumes 1 -3 are available. Knuth retired early to dedicate approximately 20 years to writing the first five volumes. He also has plans for volume 6 & 7, after the year 2015. Dr. Knuth offers $2.56 to the first person to report a particular error in his books. Why $2.56? It's a hexadecimal dollar.

Dr. Knuth quote: "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. "

The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, was started on this day in 2001. A Wiki is a web page that allows website visitors to edit and collaborate on a website.

The shortest, full-featured wiki program, according to the ShortestWikiContest, is this CGI by Casey West (222 characters of perl and shell):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI':all';path_info=~/\w+/;$_=`grep -l $& *`.h1($&).escapeHTML$t=param(t)
||`dd<$&`;open F,">$&";print F$t;s/htt\S+|([A-Z]\w+){2,}/a{href,$&},$&amp;amp;amp;/eg;
print header,pre"$_
",submit,textarea t,$t,9,70Some of the "short" wiki's at ShortestWikiContents have demos -- worth trying out.

(c) 2007, Jorge Monasterio