[wzdd]

People said the same thing about a joke Douglas Adams made in his Hitch Hikers series -- that the (corrupted) Ultimate Question to which the answer was 42 ("what do you get if you multiply six by nine?") was a maths joke because 6x9=42 in base 13. Douglas Adams said this was nonsense.

[Xirdus]

Reminds me of one of my favorite joke programs.

  #include <stdio.h>

  #define SIX 1+5
  #define NINE 8+1
  
  int main() {
      printf("%d\n", SIX * NINE);
  }

[srean]

Didn't Linus #define THREE as something else in Linux source code.

Was that the 2-3-4 tree? Can't seem to find it now.

[Xirdus]

It was from some filesystem code. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7296497

  unsigned three = 1;
  unsigned five = 5;
  unsigned seven = 7;

These actually get changed through pointers to consecutive powers of 3, 5 and 7 respectively. `three` is initialized to the 0th power of 3, but because only a single 1 is needed by the algorithm, `five` and `seven` are initialized to the 1st powers instead.

[srean]

Ah right. Thank you so much. At least I wasn't hallucinating.

[BoardsOfCanada]

And by accident, 42 happens to be the first base after her multiplication gives the answer 19 here (when 20 would be expected), although it would produce an answer of "tenteen", not twenty.