[SC.LUG] SCO LoL

Richard Smedley sc at mailman.lug.org.uk
Wed Aug 13 15:36:00 2003


On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 17:41, David Holden wrote:
> > V good - but I only laugh at jokes from
> > people who write in Python ;-PPP
> 
> Surely the above line should be indented by 4 spaces :)

A little girl goes into a pet show and asks for a wabbit. The shop
keeper looks down at her, smiles and says

"Would you like a lovely fluffy little white rabbit, or a cutesy
wootesly little brown rabbit"

"Actually", says the little girl, "I don't think my python would notice"



Anyway, the main thing is which language is
better for shooting ourself in the foot...


Python: You insert the bullet into the gun but because there were
actually TAB characters in the barrel instead of spaces, the gun jams
with an IndentError. After unblocking the whitespace jam, you try to
load the bullet into the gun, but Guido pulls it away from you and gives
you version 2.0. You finally fire the gun, but the bullet travels so
slowly towards your foot that you get tired and leave.

Perl: You pick up a Swiss army machine gun and begin to load it. The gun
and your foot begin to grow to huge proportions and the world around you
slows down, until the gun fires. It makes a tiny hole, which you don't
feel. Deciding to improve on this, you post a query to
comp.lang.perl.misc to determine the optimal approach. After sifting
through 500 replies (which you accomplish with a short perl script), not
to mention the cross-posts to the perl5-porters mailing list (for which
you upgraded your first sifter into a package, which of course you
uploaded to CPAN for others who might have a similar problem, which, of
course, is the problem of sorting out email and news, not the problem of
shooting yourself in the foot), you set to the task of simply and
elegantly shooting yourself in the foot, until you discover that, while
it works fine in most cases, NT, VMS, and various flavors of Linux, AIX,
and Irix all shoot you in the foot sooner than your Perl script could.
You finally settle on...

s/toes/blood/g for @toes;

and shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that
you invent another six completely different ways to do it. In one of
these, you separate the bullet from the gun with a hyperoptimized regex,
and then you transport it to your foot using an array of hashrefs to
arrays. However, the program fails to run and you can't see the gun
anymore. Eventually, you realise that what you really needed all along
was the Gun::Foot module off of CPAN.


Other languages at:
http://www.steve.gb.com/perl/humour.html



 - Richard

-- 
Richard Smedley
Production Editor, LinuxUser & Developer
 
T: +44 (0)1625 855084, F: +44 (0)1625 855071
richard.smedley@linuxuser.co.uk

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