ASCII strings are so convenient. Byte length and character (grapheme) length are the same, and display length is simple too (tabs are the main fiddly bit).
As soon as you have Unicode, you need to distinguish these and use non-trivial libraries!
miniblog.
Related Posts
Lisp and Erlang are the only languages I've seen where a comment can start with a single character, but it's very common to use two (;; or %% respectively)
I've heard of quines, but today I learned about radiation-hardened quines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Radiation-hardened
These are quines where *any* single character can be removed and they still function. Fun concept, seems easier in a language with eval().
Devious regexp trick I've not seen before: [^]
Negating the empty set matches any character, which lets you emulate DOTALL (i.e. a . matches newlines too) on older regexp implementations.
