> Originally, if you typed an unknown command, it would just say "this is not a git command".
Back in the 70s, Hal Finney was writing a BASIC interpreter to fit in 2K of ROM on the Mattel Intellivision system. This meant every byte was precious. To report a syntax error, he shortened the message for all errors to:
EH?
> EH?
I feel like that would also make a good response from the text parser in an old-school interactive fiction game.
Slightly related, but I remember some older variants of BASIC using "?" to represent the PRINT statement - though I think it was less about memory and more just to save time for the programmer typing in the REPL.
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How wasteful, ed uses just ? for all errors, a 3x saving
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Pretty cool.. I had no idea Hal was such a hacker on the personal computers in those days... makes me think of Bitcoin whenever I hear Hal mentioned
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I run a wordle spinoff, xordle, which involves two wordle puzzles on one board. This means you can guess a word and get all 5 letters green, but it isn't either of the target words. When you do this it just says "Huh?" on the right. People love that bit.
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I've been sorely tempted to do that with my compiler many times.
Canadians everywhere.
It'd be interesting and amusing if he'd made the private key to his part of Bitcoin a variation on that.
RIP.