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Comment by mmphosis | Hacker News Reader

   10 PRINT MID$("/\",1.5+RND(1),1);:GOTO 10

Run it on another old-school computer, like an Apple II, and you won’t get the same transfixing result, for details that have to do with the Commodore 64’s character set, called PETSCII.

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Is it the same as this C snippet?

  main() { while (1) printf("%c", rand()%2 ? '/' : '\\'); }

Edit: Golfed my original snippet down, then put back original after mmphosis's identical translation.

yes.

  #include <stdio.h>
  main() { for(;;) printf(rand()%2 ? "/" : "\\"); }

Small variant:

void main() { while (1) printf("%c", "/\\"[rand()%2] ); }

i think the key point is that / and \ do not span their character cells from corner to corner.

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