main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }

While riding patterns in a snowy field today, I had the idea to write something.

If you're any good with an Etch-a-Sketch, and your horse is flexible and responsive to the aids, you can have fun spelling in snow too!

You'll need a huge unblemished field of snow (and your flexible, responsive and patient horse).

HMMMM what shall I write...

Of course it has to be cursive. There is no way to pick your horse up off the "paper" to start a new letter.

I decided to write hello world*, the default phrase for any new platform.

Some of the letters were much harder than others. The W in particular. How do you do a W without lifting your "pencil"? The middle of the W required backing up in our tracks. Whew, that was rough!

The lowercase R turned out awesome, and required some 90 degree turns on the haunches.

The three Ls were really easy.

I was so pleased with the way it turned out, I decided to do an enormous star too.

Afterwards I remembered I had the Garmin on the saddle so I zoomed in. Sure enough, a star! Here is the pic of our tracks. Unfortunately the hello world did not turn out clearly on the Garmin, because I didn't have the settings fine enough. (It should have been set to record track every 2 seconds instead of 10 meters. But you can read it clearly in RL!)

Hm, I wonder what lunging looks like? Exactly what you'd expect, overlapping tracks and even lines from where Baasha cut across the middle trying to avoid an icy patch. Note the satellite reception was not accurate and placed us kind of next to the roundpen image.

Since our field is pristine (except for a rabbit track), I thought I should write a nice message there too, but by then Baasha was tired. It takes a lot of effort to do huge letters in snow. Maybe tomorrow. The snow is not going away anytime soon.

___
* - "Hello World" is the first program one usually writes when learning a new programming language. The first Hello World program appeared in chapter 1.1 of the first edition of Kernighan & Ritchie's original book about C, "The C Programming Language", in 1978 and read like this:

main() {
printf("hello, world\n");
}

Since then, Hello World has been implemented in just about every programming language on the planet.