Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It For You All…”

[SiliconWizard]

Oh, just ran into this gem. I've always found Bjarne Stroustrup certainly brillant, but a bit nuts. Just a personal opinion of course. But after reading this, which admittedly is now a bit old, you'll have a hard time convincing me he isn't - I mean, nuts.

https://stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

Note the date of the referenced "AT&T Labs Technical Report no. 42, April 1,1998".

Yeah. OK, might have been an April fool's, but point is, the report is available on his official website.

This being said, I'm still not convinced if this is April fools or not, because the content is not that different from what C++ actually became.

Uh sure. But "whitespace overloading", really?
But yeah, I would really love to see how Python maintainers would react to this idea.

The problem with Bjarne Stroustrup is, you can't know. It's entirely possible the whole C++ is just a piece of modern art, a psychological experiment, or pure trolling. Nobody knows if Bjarne Stroustrup ever was serious, or if he is laughing in his beard, watching the world go really serious with C++.

Well, if the paper was actually an April fool's, this is a problem and gets us back to the famous interview, which, after all, may have been real as well.
Maybe the guy has a very subtle sense of humour - but if so, that is a problem, because indeed, we can never know.

Laughing in his beard... maybe, but I'm not so sure though. Or the joke has been lasting for a very long time now.
You can just watch this recent video. If this was all an experiment, then kudos:

[magic]

Wait, did you fall for it or am I falling for some second order trolling now?

Whitespace overloading is weird, but the idea about automatically splitting variable names was obviously too insane even by C++ standards