I read Petzold cover to cover and this was straightforward
I would just guess Polish for every word that has a Z. Probably not entirely correct but I doubt I could improve much from there
1 = Win32 2 = Polish
121212212121121212121?
Fun, but I don’t love the Polish word selection because a lot of these are supposed to contain special characters and they’re not actual real Polsih words without them.
Like blad - that’s not a word. Błąd is a word, it means a mistake. So does this count or no? Or kal vs kał, one is a word (means feces) and one is just some letters.
Out of curiosity, if an average person were to type it in all caps on their computer, would they be able to easily type the diacritics?
They would, all diacritics is alt + letter.
In Poland we use standard qwerty keyboards with Polish keyboard layout set (called Polish Programmers), you press alt+character to get the special version (like alt+s gives you ś, alt+a gives you ą and so on, the only nonintuitive one is alt+x which is ź (because alt+z is taken by ż). Combine with shift or caps lock for capital versions. No issues.
Neat. I wish the French had something similar!
it doesn’t work as well for French because there are multiple accents for a given letter (è, é, ê, ë…)
Can do it with the compose key if you’re on *nix, and here’s an implementation for Windows.
<compose> + e + ^ = ê, and <compose> + shift + E + " = Ë, etc.
You can also use compose key on any distro (from my experience) with KDE Plasma or GNOME
Or you can use a French keyboard layout, type ` followed by a to get à, same with â, ä, or ç. É has its own key, since it’s more common and the only letter that uses the acute accent. No more complicated than key combinations, and easier hand positions than 3-key combinations, really.
Oh, noooo… I’ve been now thinking of using Alt+letter to launch !ahk@programming.dev scripts! Oh, well… Guess I’ll continue to live in MURRIKA instead of learning like the rest of the world.
This looks fun. I don’t know any Polish but I’ve seen it around, and I used to be kinda fluent in win32 years ago. I’ll have a go.
spoiler
- LPCWSTR win32 string type
- PSZCZYNA Polish
- WCSLEN win32 type for storing the length of a WCS (whatever that is)
- WCZESNY Polish
- LPCTSTR win32 string type
- BYDGOSZCZ Polish
- WSTRZAS Polish. Tricky because it contains STR, but feels much more Polish than win32.
- HGDIOBJ Polish?
- DOWOD Polish
- HWINSTA win32. handle for a (static?) window maybe.
- DLUGOSC Polish
- LPCSTR win32 string type
- DWORD win32 (and any other c based 32bit OS) 4 byte integer type (or 8 bytes in 64 bit OSs)
- KAL Polish??
- LPWSTR win32 string type
- SZCZECIN Polish
- BLAD Polish
- PUHALF Win32 pointer to unsigned 1 byte integer
- CHUJ Polish
- UHALF win32 unsigned 1 byte integer
damn, you’re good.
Identifying the windows string types is fun. The letters are supposed to have a meaning. Without looking them up, my guess is:
LP_ - Length Prepended
C_STR - C string / null-terminated
WSTR - “Wide” string / utf-16
TSTR - I have no ideaLP is actually “Long Pointer”, which means 32 bits. Why is that called a long pointer? Because that’s what a long pointer was on win16. Same reason a DWORD (double word) is also 32 bits, because a word was 16 bits.
I haven’t really done much with coding 64 bit Windows applications so I don’t if it’s the same, but Windows 16 bit roots was very obvious in win32.
Thanks for correcting me. Considering a
longis also 32 bits, a “Long Pointer” being 32 bits makes sense.I haven’t done much programming that makes use of the win32 types, but just from tech support and sysadmin type stuff I can confirm that DWORDs are still 32 bits. See them a lot in the Registry.
Given Window’s (sometimes questionable) attempts to maintain backwards compatibility, and the fact that a lot of the OS functionality and sysadmin tools are, at best, kludge built up in layers over decades on top of the old tools, I would strongly suspect that the win32 types are still the exact same size-wise despite the now 64-bit underlying architecture.
I mean Szczecin and Bydgoszcz are fairly well known place names, and chuj is a well known word for other reasons, so those are the easiest apart from DWORD which I think I’ve seen in the Windows registry.
I would have picked the same except for HGDIOBJ, the OBJ screams “object” and it wouldn’t be very pronounceable in Polish orthography, not even by the standards of Polish. Have not looked any up though.
The H in HGDIOBJ could mean “handle to” and if I’m remembering right, GDI is a Windows graphics drawing interface.
DWORD is as obvious to me as all the ones containing unicode strings.
I’m not Polish (not too far away though).
I think I’d get most of these right, but probably not all. HWINSTA? DOWOD?
HWINSTA is not a real word, but DOWOD is (“dowód”, meaning proof).
Here are my guesses compiled from the very little knowledge of polish i have from being hungarian and my general programming knowledge(i have never in my life done any windows programming or even touched it with a 6 foot long yardstick):
spoiler
Pszczyna
Wczesny
Bydogoszcz
Dowod
Hwinsta?(the h looks sus)
Dlugosc(im not sure sc is possible in polish)
Kal
Szczecin
Blad
Chuj
Also a lot of these would have a million diacritics on them no?
the missing diacritics slightly annoy me (but it also makes sense considering they would give the polish ones away)
As if I ever needed proof of spending way too much time with windows server
FCKGW
RHQQ2
YXRKT
8TG6W2B7Q8
A seal has been opened.
Windows is built using Hungarian notation . Comparing it to Polish feels a bit wrong.
Yeah but our phonology is way more strict than polish’s so they just dont work in hungarian sadly. Tho its funny that string is sz which i think just comes from sz being pronounced like s in string in hungarian but in polish its much more logical where sz is pronounced like sh in shack and s is pronounced s.
I’m Polish and I’m hesitating about Hwinsta.
It’s apparently a win32 type, it’s almost valid in polish which is funny though
If it was polish it would start with ch…
Aboslutely, but chwinsta could tottaly be in polish dictionary. Sounds like some type of animal feed based on beetroot.
It definitely would transform to chwiństwa, as that’s how polish words morph. But I see your point.
Kurwa bobr!





