Editing Polyglot (computing) (section)

==Construction==

A polyglot is composed by combining syntax from two or more different formats, leveraging various syntactic constructs that are either common between the formats, or constructs that are language specific but carrying different meaning in each language. A file is a valid polyglot if it can be successfully interpreted by multiple interpreting programs. For example, a PDF-Zip polyglot might be opened as both a valid PDF document and decompressed as a valid [[ZIP (file format)|zip]] archive. To maintain validity across interpreting programs, one must ensure that constructs specific to one interpreter are not interpreted by another, and vice versa.
This is often accomplished by hiding language-specific constructs in segments interpreted as comments or plain text of the other format.<ref name="ACMNOV13"/>