Since it is the Chinese New Year, I thought I would say 恭喜发财 to all my Chinese readers and entertain you with a little tidbit of information about C# that you may not be aware of.
You would undoubtedly expect this code to compile correctly:
string HappyNewYear = "恭喜发财";
However, did you know that this will compile correctly as well?
string 恭喜发财 = "Happy New Year";
As an explanation: If the Unicode standard considers something to be a letter, C# allows it in identifiers. This means that Chinese ideographs are all fair game. Unfortunately, however, this is likely to make you rather unpopular in code reviews with any of your co-workers who can’t read Chinese.
Incidentally, 恭喜发财 (pronounced “gong xi fett choi”) translates approximately as “Live long and prosper.” If you are a Trekkie, remember to give a Vulcan salute when you say it.
For the record: I do not speak Klingon.
The rumour that I am fluent in “thlingan hol” stems from a geekiness competition that a few of us had at work a couple of years ago. For a day or two, one or two individuals were attempting to out-geek each other by sending MSN messages encoded in binary, hexadecimal, octal and Base 64, and some of them even came my way. I didn’t pay much attention at the time, until someone managed to dig out the Klingon translation of the Bible from somewhere on the web and sent Psalm 117 round to us in an e-mail. Needless to say, when I committed it to memory and recited it a day or so later, the general consensus was that I’d out-geeked the lot of them. It wasn’t actually a big deal. Psalm 117 is the shortest chapter of the Bible, and the Klingon translation consists of a mere fifteen words. It’s the kind of thing you can work out and memorise in ten minutes or so if you are that way inclined.
Apart from that, my knowledge of Klingon is zero, and I intend to keep it that way.
The fact is, it gained me a bit of a reputation, and people still occasionally ask me to recite it for them. I did at first, but now I generally refuse to do so, partly because I started to think it was a bit disrespectful to the Word of God, but also because most people tend to regard you as a bit of a nutter if you speak Klingon.
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Posted at 07:00 on 7 February 2008.
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