The moment Anil Dash published his now-famous blog entry on the grammar used by lolcats, Cats Can Has Grammar , the door to studies that were equal parts silly and serious was opened. Not to be content with mere lexical and semiotic analysis of lolcats, some folks have taken it to the next level: the LOLCODE programming language.

LOLCODE is your standard Algol-style programming language (Algol is the grandfather of just about every popular current programming language) married to the lolcat captioning style — that is, ALL CAPS and I CAN HAS SILLY CAT GRAMMER AND SPELING KTHXBYE.

Here’s HAI WORLD, the LOLCODE version of “Hello, World!”:

HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE 1 2 3 4 HAI CAN HAS STDIO ? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE

Here’s something that outputs the numbers 1 through 10, a classic beginner’s exercise:

HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A VAR IM IN YR LOOP UP VAR!!1 VISIBLE VAR IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 HAI CAN HAS STDIO ? I HAS A VAR IM IN YR LOOP UP VAR ! ! 1 VISIBLE VAR IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10 ? KTHXBYE IM OUTTA YR LOOP KTHXBYE

And finally, here’s a program to print the contents of a specified file:

HAI CAN HAS STDIO? PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"? AWSUM THX VISIBLE FILE O NOES INVISIBLE "ERROR!" KTHXBYE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 HAI CAN HAS STDIO ? PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT" ? AWSUM THX VISIBLE FILE O NOES INVISIBLE "ERROR!" KTHXBYE