ARM Club 1/ARM_CLUB_CD.iso/contents/sillies/silly9/FootShoot2

Text File | 1994-04-06 | 7KB | 183 lines

     HOW TO DETERMINE WHICH PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE YOU'RE USING
     --------------------------------------------------------

The 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.

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 round the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.

APL:
You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't
remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell happened.

C++:
You accidentally 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."

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."

Modula/2
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the
language, you shoot yourself in the head.

sh, csh:
You can't remember the syntax for anything so you spend five hours
reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer.

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.

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.

Algol:
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket.  The musket is
aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent
medic in the emergency room.

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.

BASIC:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol.  On big systems, continue
until entire lower body is waterlogged.

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.

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).

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.

English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
(For those who don't know, English is a McDonnell Douglas / PICK
query language which allegedly requires 110% of system resources
to run happily.)

INFORMIX:
The first gun doesn't work. Three months later INFORMIX's support
desk send another gun which doesn't match the version number of
the bullets. INFORMIX suggest you upgrade to INFORMIX-ONLINE.
You pull the trigger and your shoe gets wet.

ORACLE:
ORACLE sell you a gun, a box of bullets, a holster, a cardboard
mock-up of a wild west town and a stetson. You find the trigger
takes twenty-seven people to pull it. ORACLE provide 26 consultants
all with holsters, cardboard mock-ups and stetsons. The bullet
doesn't leave the gun barrel and you hire four more ORACLE
consultants to optimise. The bullet bounces off your sandals.
You decide to buy INGRES. Richard Donkin shoots you in the foot.

INGRES:
You pull the trigger, and your identical twin in San Francisco gets
shot. You then turn off distributed query optimisation.

SYBASE:
You carelessly invoke the procedure sp_insert_bullet() which fires
a trigger (neat, eh) on the table GUN. To maintain referential
integrity, the system invokes another trigger which inserts bullets
in your other foot, your shins, your thighs, pelvis and so on up to
the cranium. You are left in third normal form.

OCCAM:
You send a message to your finger, which sends a message to the
trigger, which sends a message to the firing pin, which sends a
message to the primer, which sends a message to the firing charge,
which sends a message to the bullet which sends a very unpleasant
message to your foot.

The pipeline continues to run, a hail of bullets emerging from the
output channel and drilling their way via your foot to the centre
of the Earth. The high velocity arrival of such stupendous amounts
of lead creates a density shock-wave which eventually collapses
beyond its own event horizon. The black hole thus formed goes on
to absorb the Earth, most of the minor planets and the Sun.

The problems of your foot become increasingly insignificant during
this process.

Hyper-intelligent beings from the planet Zorg nod their several
heads wisely and confide to each other: "I always said Tony was
a complete twat."

FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot.

Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

SNOBOL: If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail,
shoot yourself in the right foot.

Concurrent Euclid: You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left 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.

Unix: % Is foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm *.o rm: .o: No such
file or directory % Is %.

XBase: Shooting yourself is no problem. If you want to shoot yourself
in the foot, you'll have to use Clipper.

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.

Visual Basic: You`ll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much
fun doing it that you won't care.

Prolog: 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.

370JCL: 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.

Ain`t it the truth?