[Haskell-cafe] Who started 42, and when?

[Loup Vaillant]

2008/2/1, Christopher L Conway <cconway at cs.nyu.edu>:
> Loup,
>
> This is not unique to the Haskell community. I suspect the arbitrary
> constant 42 has been appearing unexplained in research papers for as
> long as there have been computer scientists who were sci-fi geeks
> (absolutely no offense intended to geeks ;-). It would be very
> difficult indeed to figure out who did this first, without some highly
> dedicated library research.

I suspected this. Just that I didn't noticed 42 but in Haskell papers.
Maybe this is just a bias due to my recent interests. I should check
some C/C++/Lisp/Ocaml papers.

About the library search, Maybe it is possible to try a giant "grep"
on all papers in ACM Portal, or CiteSeer?

Loup