computer

Programmers guide

Instructions on how to shoot yourself in the foot in various computer languages and system interfaces


Caution! Please move any beverages and snacks away from your computer system before reading the remainder of this message. Do NOT attempt to eat or drink while reading this document.


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. The problem to be solved is as easy as it could be, you got to shoot yourself
in the foot! And here are the solutions for each language:

C:

You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++:

You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance 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.«

Ada:

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.

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.

APL:

You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.

Apple System 7:

Double click the gun icon and a window giving a selection for guns, target areas, plus ballon help with medical remedies, and assorted sound effects. Click shoot button and small bomb appears with note »Error of type 1 has occurred.«

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 in sight.

Assembly:

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.

CLIPPER:

You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you 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_.

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.

Concurrent Euclid:

You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

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.

DOS:

You finally found the gun, but can't locate the file with the foot for the life of you.

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.)

FidoNet:

You put your foot in your mouth, then echo it internationally.

Forth:

yourself foot shoot.

FORTH:

Foot yourself in the 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.

Genetic Algorithms:

You create 10,000 strings describing the best way to shoot yourself in the foot. By the time the program produces the optimal solution, humans have evolved wings and the problem is moot.

HyperTalk:

put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you answer the result

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 you shoe gets wet.

INGRES:

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

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.

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 ho..

Modula/2:

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

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.

Neural Networks:

You train the network in how to shoot your foot, after which it generalizes and keeps trying to locate some guy named Connor on the net...

Objective-C (NeXT):

You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.

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 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'

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.

Paradox:

Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.

Pascal:

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

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.

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.

Revelation:

You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

RTL:

You start to really shoot yourself in the foot, but 6 slugs is too many for an array and blows the compiler to pieces. Eventually you realise you must rebuild the compiler to allow such huge arrays. This is so stupid and boring that you start shoot yourself, but just in time you are interrupted by .....

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 ho..
..but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

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.

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.

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.

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.

UNIX:

% ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm *.o
rm: .O: No such file or directory
% ls
%

Visual Basic:

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