I’m sure most people by now know about the whole Lolcat phenomena, however, for those still living under a rock:
A Lolcat, or LOLCAT, is an image combining a photograph, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “Kitty Pidgin”,[1] “lolspeak”, or Lolcat.
Lolcat or Kitty Pidgin has been around for a while now, and has been made popular by sites like I Can Has Cheezburger?…however in spite of its popularity, to find a programming language based on Kitty Pidgin still came as a real surprise to me.
Lolcode, created on 25 May 2007, is a programming language created by Adam Lindsay based on lolcat.
The language is still fairly young and at the moment has the following subset of keywords
- btw
- byes
- can-has
- diaf
- gimmeh
- gtfo
- hai
- i-has-a
- im-in-yr
- im-outta-yr
- in-mah
- iz
- kthx
- kthxbye
- lol-r
- operators
- visible
Writing a program in lolcode seems surprisingly easy for people who understand lolcat, the main thing to remember is that HAI is used at the start of a program and KTHXBYE ends the program.
The default hello world program is as simple as
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE
The language also contains error handling using AWSUM THX on success and O NOES which is the exception block!
The reason you probably haven’t yet seen a whole slew of lolcode applications yet, is that the language is still being defined with respect to operator priorities and correct syntax. Some compilers, however, already exist, like this one in python.
For the time being, this is another addition to my ‘must try at least once’ list…KTHXBYE!
