THE PROGRAMMER'S QUICK GUIDE TO THE LANGUAGES The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you're currently using. This handy reference is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such a dilemma. TASK: Shoot yourself in the foot. 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." 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 with the attempts to shoot yourself anyways because you have no exception-handling capability. Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot. Ada: After correctly packing 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 you can't because your foot is of the wrong type. COBOL: Using a COLT 45 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 re-tied. 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 the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds... FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot. Prolog: You tell your program that you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't permit it to explain it to you. BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On large systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged. Visual Basic: You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have had so much fun doing it that you won't care. HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result. Motif: You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the bullet, its trajectory, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams. APL: You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters. SNOBOL: If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot. 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. 370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried. Paradox: Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can, too. Access: You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead. Revelation: You're sure you're going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these nifty little bullet-thingies are for. Assembler: You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot. Modula2: After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head. SQL: insert into foot select bullet from gun where calibre = "0.45"; commit work; ksh: export CALIBRE=45 set -A COLT $CALIBRE $CALIBRE $CALIBRE $CALIBRE $CALIBRE $CALIBRE foreach bullet in ${COLT[*]}; do shoot -c $bullet >> foot & echo scream done wait && sleep $RANDOM Python: You fire the gun, but the bullet travels so slowly towards your foot that you get tired and leave. 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. Python: You try to load the bullet into the gun, but Guido pulls it away from you and gives you version 2.0. You try to load the bullet into that gun, but he pulls it away again and gives you 2.1 and the gun rejects the bullet. You get another bullet and try again, but he gives you the beta for 2.2 and this time the bullet gets lost inside. Python: You're new to shooting. You start to load the bullet, but then realize the gun does not have a safety on it so you dutifully report your brilliant and original discovery in comp.lang.python and after the thread finally dies out you have forgotten to shoot yourself in the foot. (I note wryly that in no case does Python actually allow you to shoot yourself in the foot! ) Basic Python You shoot yourself in the foot. Python (Heavily Optimized) You save a reference to the getting-shot method of your foot so that you can shoot yourself over and over without having to take aim each time. Python (<2.2 member lookup) You ask your foot about getting shot. It doesn't know how to answer, so you check its address book. There's nothing about getting shot there, so you ask your foot about Footness, and check Footness's address book. Python (2.2 member lookup) You ask your foot about Footness, you ask Footness about "getting shot", and you tell "getting shot" about your foot. This yields a bound getting-shot methods ready to convey bullets to your foot. Python (Old-style iteration) You want to shoot the toes off your foot. You train your foot to consider your toes as members of a list from one to five. You count off, shooting at the toe your foot indicates. When your foot complains that there is no sixth toe, your toes will be gone. Python (New-style iteration) You want to shoot the toes off your foot. You wiggle them one by one, shooting the wiggling toes. When there are no more, you're done. Python (With generators) You want to shoot the toes off your foot. You ask your foot to tell you about all of your toes, but to please pause for a while after each one so you can shoot it. After you shoot, your foot begins where it left off. Python (c.l.py Flamewar version) "I've never held this kind of gun before, but its (indentation/ floating-point semantics/__future__ directives) make me utterly certain that everyone who does must be shooting themselves in the foot!" Python (Psyco version) Just as you're about to shoot yourself in the foot, your foot notices it's about to get shot by a bullet, the bullet notices it's about to hit your foot, and each immediately conforms to the other's shape. Future foot-bullet contacts will be far faster. Python (Time Machine version). You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to realize that there's no need, since Guido thoughtfully shot you in the foot years ago.