Nil
Nil is the world's first Nihilistic programming language. Essentially, it parses commands of any complexity, and then ignores them.
Examples
Here is the traditional Nil program:
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
A more practical program:
Please, give a NOP if life is either meaningful or not meaningful.
The shortest known Nil quine:
Implementations
One of the most widely deployed Nil interpreters is true, which is shipped as standard with many popular operating systems including GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. The traditional Nil program above (wordsworth.nil) can be invoked thus:
true wordsworth.nil
Alternatively, since the language syntax allows the use of 'shebang' lines, Nil programmers may wish to adopt the following convention to make their programs directly executable:
#!/usr/bin/true -w I wandered lonely as a cloud.
./wordsworth.nil
Notice the use of the -w option in the above example, which turns on compiler warnings; novice Nil programmers are strongly encouraged to make use of this feature. There is also a scratch interpreter:
and a C/C++ interpreter:
int main(){
return 0;
}
and a Python interpreter:
pass
and an even shorter Python interpreter:
, which is also the shortest possible Python program. In fact, it works on many other languages (e.g. JavaScript, brainfuck) as well. It is even a self interpreter, but that isn't surprising because any program is a self interpreter. However, this one is the shortest possible.
Bootstrapping
Incredibly, despite not being Turing-complete, the Nil language is expressive enough to implement an interpreter for itself, much more concisely than many 'proper' languages can. The example presented here is a simple implementation, but using advanced compression techniques Nil developers have been able to produce working interpreters in as little as 0 lines of code.
#!/usr/bin/true -w My mother had a Flit gun 'Twas not devoid of charm A bit of Flit Shot out of it; The rest shot up her arm
This can be seen to run any Nil program successfully, including our example programs from above:
> ./nil_interpreter.nil wordsworth.nil > ./nil_interpreter.nil quine.nil