sethwoodworth/foucaults-pendulum-anagram-yhvh — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-07-17 · repo last pushed 2017-03-18
Explore how a novel's theme of hidden patterns can be expressed as a small program
Play with anagram rearrangements of the letters YHVH
Study a simple piece of BASIC code as a curiosity or literary artifact
Written in Visual Basic, so you'll need a compatible interpreter or the classic VB runtime to run it.
This is a small program written in BASIC, an old, simple programming language, that's based on a concept from Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum. The novel is famous for exploring themes of conspiracy, hidden meanings, and the human tendency to find patterns in randomness. This program is a piece of that literary world brought to life. The program appears to work with anagrams and the Hebrew letters YHVH (the sacred name of God in Judaism). In the novel, characters become obsessed with finding secret connections and hidden messages in texts and symbols. This code is likely a playful implementation of that obsession, taking letters and rearranging them to find or explore different combinations. It's the kind of thing the book's characters might have actually written if they were real people tinkering with code instead of just theorizing about secret patterns. If you're interested in this, you're probably either a fan of Eco's work who wants to see how its ideas translate into actual code, or someone curious about the intersection of literature and programming. The repository doesn't go into much detail about what the program actually does or how to run it, so the README leaves most of the story to your imagination, fitting for a project inspired by a novel about hidden meanings.
A small BASIC program that plays with anagrams of the Hebrew letters YHVH, inspired by the hidden-pattern obsession in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.
Mainly Visual Basic. The stack also includes Visual Basic.
Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2017-03-18).
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
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