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Off Topic: Shooting yourself in the foot



>                     Shooting Yourself in the Foot
>                                  or
>   ______    How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
>  (__  __)   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>    / /
>   / /
>  (_/he proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have
>  stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to
>  remember which language you're using.  This guide is offered as a public
>  service to help programmers in such dilemmas.
>
>  C:         You shoot yourself in the foot.
>
>  C++:       You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them
>             all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible
>             since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just
>             pointing at others and saying, "that's me, over there."
>
>  Objective-C (NeXT): You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot
>             so that all people can get shot in their feet.
>  Ada:       If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United
>             States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in
>             front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his
>             feet."
>          or
>             After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently
>             load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the
>             foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of
>             the wrong type.
>
>  Algol:     You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is
>             esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent
>             medic in the emergency room.
>
>  Pascal:    The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
>
>  APL:       You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you
>             don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened.
>           or
>             You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out
>             how to do it fewer characters.
>
>  Assembly:  You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system
>             administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After
>             a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself
>             in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting
>             at everyone n sight.
>          or
>             You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you
>             must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.
>
>  BASIC:     Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue
>             until entire lower body is waterlogged.
> Visual Basic: You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so
>             much fun doing it that you won't care.
>
>  COBOL:     USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place
>             ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN
>             return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs
>             to be retied.
>
>
>  DBase:     You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by
>             the time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot
>             yourself anyway. <rboatright
>
>  DBase IV version 1.0: You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun
>             was a poorly-designed grenade and the whole building blows up.
>
>  Forth:     yourself foot shoot.
>
>  FORTRAN:   You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out
>             of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat.  If you run
>             out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-
>             processing ability.
>
>  Modula/2:  After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything
>             in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
>
>  sh, csh, etc.:
>             You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five
>             hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the
>             computer and switch to C.
>
>  Smalltalk: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing
>             system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your
> workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character
>             terminal.
>
>  PL/I:      You consume all available system resources, including all the
>             offline bullets. The DataProcessing&Payroll Department doubles
>             its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and
>             drops the original one on your foot.
>
>  Prolog:    You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing
>             to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in
>             your face.
>          or
>             You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot.  The
>             program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow
>             it to explain.
>
>  SNOBOL:    You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to
>             be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then
>             changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).
>
>  SNOBOL:    If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot.  If you fail,
>             shoot yourself in the right foot.
>
>  lisp:      You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
>             which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
>             with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
>             gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
>
> scheme:    You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with
>             which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun
>             with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
>             gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
>             ...but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.
>
>
>
>  Paradox    Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
>
>  Revelation You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon
>             as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
>
>  English:   You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
>
>  CLIPPER:   You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that ou
>             can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the
>             bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the
>             mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_.
>
>  SQL:       You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it
>             returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the
>             attachment at the end of your leg.
>
>  370 JCL    You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining
>             how you want it to be shot.  Three years later, your foot comes
>             back deep-fried.
>
>  Unix       % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
>             % rm *.o
>             rm:.o: No such file or directory
>             % ls
>             %
>  Concurrent Euclid:  You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
>
>  HyperTalk:  Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of
>              you.  Answer the result.
>
>  Motif:     You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the
>             trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory
>             handles of the gun.  When you finally get around to pulling the
>             trigger, the gun jams.
>
>
>  P.S.: If a train-station is, where a train stops, what is a workstation ??


Read U soon

		Patricia

--
______________________________________________________________________________
Patricia Jung        merrykju@IRC  PGP-key on request
e-mail: pjung@uni-freiburg.de      http://rummelplatz.uni-mannheim.de/~pjung/
______________Anwenderberatung RZ: Tel. ++49-761/203-4620_____________________
Linus v.2.0 -- the future of Linux is female (and called Patricia ;)