[brendano]

If you bet on the right platform, code can live for a while.

For example: this classic paper on compression http://web.stanford.edu/class/ee398a/handouts/papers/WittenA...

was published with a C, Unix-based implementation (I put it here http://brenocon.com/WittenNealCleary-ArithmeticEncodin-cacm-...)

which compiles and runs fine (just lots of compiler warnings) on modern Linux and OS X, 18 years later.