[ab]using Unicode to create tragedy
mimic provokes:
- fun
- frustration
- curiosity
- murderous rage
It's inspired by this terrible idea floating around:
MT: Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error
— Peter Ritchie (@peterritchie) November 16, 2014There are many more characters in the Unicode character set that look, to some extent or another, like others - homographs. Mimic substitutes common ASCII characters for obscure homographs.
Fun games to play with mimic:
- Pipe some source code through and see if you can find all of the problems
- Pipe someone else's source code through without telling them
- Be fired, and then killed
./mimic --list # Show all of the homographs
./mimic --explain=o # What crazy things can we do with this letter?
./mimic --me-harder 100 # Type some lines in and mess with every single char
./mimic --reverse # Undo the mayhem. Boooring.
cat mimic | ./mimic # Pipe the source through itself at 1%
# Turn up the knob and save the results
cat mimic | ./mimic --me-harder 25 > mimicked
# Or, if your code acts strange, but you have seen this prank before:
cat mimicked | ./mimic --reverse > unmimicked
diff unmimicked mimic
Observe the mayhem:
"BUT WHY?"
Or, if you've been mimicked a little harder,
[Wikipedia: Unicode Equivalence] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence)