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

2008/2/1, Christopher L Conway :

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