217 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
217 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
______ How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
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(__ __) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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/ /
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/ /
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(_/he proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have
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stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to
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remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public
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service to help programmers in such dilemmas.
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C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
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C++: You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them
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all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible
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since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just
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pointing at others and saying, "that's me, over there."
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Ada: If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United
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States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in
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front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his
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feet."
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Ada: After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently
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load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the
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foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the
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wrong type.
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Algol: You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is
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esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent
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medic in the emergency room.
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APL: You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you
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don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
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APL: You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out
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how to do it fewer characters.
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Apple System 7: Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection
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for guns, target areas, plus ballon help with medical remedies,
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and assorted sound effects. Click shoot button and small bomb
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appears with note "Error of type 1 has occurred."
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Assembly: You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system
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administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After
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a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself
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in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting
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at everyone in sight.
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Assembly: You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you
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must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
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BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue
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until entire lower body is waterlogged.
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CLIPPER: You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that ou
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can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the
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bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the
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mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_.
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COBOL: USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place
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ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN
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return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs
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to be retied.
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Concurrent Euclid: You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
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DBase: You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by
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the time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot
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yourself anyway. <rboatright>
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DBase IV version 1.0: You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun
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was a poorly-designed grenade and the whole building blows up.
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English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
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(For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas/PICK query
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language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources to run
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happily.)
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Forth: yourself foot shoot.
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FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out
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of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run
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out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-
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processing ability.
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Genetic Algorithms: You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot
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yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal
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solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.
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HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you.
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Answer the result.
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INFORMIX: The first gun doesn't work. Three months later INFORMIX's support
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desk send another gun which doesn't match the version number of the
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bullets. INFORMIX suggest you upgrade to INFORMIX-ONLINE. You pull
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the trigger and you shoe gets wet.
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INGRES: You pull the trigger, and your identical twin in San Franciso gets
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shot. You then turn off distributed query optimisation.
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370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining
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how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back
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deep-fried.
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Lisp: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
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which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
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with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
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gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
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Modula/2: After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything
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in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
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Motif: You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the
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trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the
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ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling
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the trigger, the gun jams.
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Neural Networks: You train the network in how to shoot your foot, after which
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it generalizes and keeps trying to locate some guy named Connor on
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the net...
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Objective-C (NeXT): You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot
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so that all people can get shot in their feet.
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OCCAM: You send a message to your finger, which sends a message to the
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trigger, which sends a message to the firing pin, which sends a
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message to the primer, which sends a message to the firing charge,
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which sends a message to the bullet which sends a very unpleasant
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message to your foot.
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The pipeline continues to run, a hail of bullets emerging from the
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output channel and drilling their way via your foot to the centre of
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the earth. The high velocity arrival of such stupendous amounts of
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lead creates a density shock-wave which eventually collapses beyond
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its own event horizon. The black hole thus formed goes on to absorb
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earth, most of the minor planets and the Sun.
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The problems of your foot become increasingly insignificant during
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this process.
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Hyper intelligent beings from the planet Zorg nod their several heads
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wisely and confide to each other:
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`I always said Tony was a complete twat'
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ORACLE: ORACLE sell you a gun, a box of bullets, a holster, a cardboard
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mock-up of a wild-west town and a stetson. You find the trigger takes
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twenty seven people to pull it. ORACLE provide 26 consultants all
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with holsters, cardboard mock-ups and stetsons. The bullet doesn't
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leave the gun-barrel and you hire four more ORACLE consultants to
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optimise. The bullet bounces off your sandals. You decide to buy
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INGRES. Richard Donkin shoots you in the foot.
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Paradox: Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
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Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
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PL/I: You consume all available system resources, including all the
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offline bullets. The DataProcessing&Payroll Department doubles
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its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and
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drops the original one on your foot.
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Prolog: You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing
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to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in
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your face.
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Prolog: You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The
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program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow
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it to explain.
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Revelation: You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon
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as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
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RTL: You start to really shoot yourself in the foot, but 6 slugs is too
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many for an array and blows the compiler to pieces. Eventually you
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realise you must rebuild the compiler to allow such huge arrays.
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This is so stupid and boring that you start shoot yourself, but just
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in time you are interrupted by .....
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Scheme: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
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which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
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with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
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gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
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...but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.
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sh, csh, etc.:
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You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five
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hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the
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computer and switch to C.
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Smalltalk: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing
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system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your
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workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character
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terminal.
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SNOBOL: You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to
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be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then
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changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).
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SNOBOL: If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail,
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shoot yourself in the right foot.
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SQL: You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it
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returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the
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attachment at the end of your leg.
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SYBASE: You carelessly invoke the procedure sp_insert_bullet() which firesa
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trigger (neat, eh) on the table GUN. To maintain referential
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integrity, the system invokes another trigger which inserts bullets
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in your other foot, your shins, your thighs, pelvis and so on up to
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the cranium. You are left in third normal form.
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UNIX: % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
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% rm *.o
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rm: .O: No such file or directory
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% ls
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%
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Visual Basic: You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so
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much fun doing it that you won't care. |