A recent story from Segfault. I don't know if geeks are able to get abstract humour as message or not but considering that earlier in the year they did an article on 'perl is dead' that maybe someone should be paying attention to how sharp the blade is on this.....biting sarcasm. e. http://www.segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=39897e26-060c53e0 Microsoft Marketese Claims Highest Density of Non-Alphanumeric Characters, Surpassing Perl Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: !@*$#) announced today that with the announcement of its mythical language C#, along with technologies like ASP+ and COM+, the company has dealt Open Source another devastating blow: Microsoft Marketese has achieved the highest density of non-alphanumeric characters in any language, displacing the popular scripting language Perl, which long held this distinction. "We?re+ so excited#, we?re@ so much* better than that sissy& unpunctuated Open Source crap," the newly renamed $teve &allmer, Microsoft head honcho, was quoted as saying. Dick Hardt of ActiveState offered his two cents as well. "This is incredibly cool. We've been involved in Perl for quite a while, and now that Microsoft essentially owns us, well, we get to be a part of both worlds." Critics were quick to point out that unlike Perl, Microsoft Marketese can't actually be used to program computers and therefore is useless. Representatives of Microsoft's accounting department vigorously disagreed, displaying proof after proof that Microsoft Marketese was a great way to generate untold revenue from clueless managers everywhere, without having to retain the skills of expensive computer programmers. Microsoft plans to expand Marketese in the future, adding a pound sign to every language currently in their suite of compilers and a plus sign to every acronym currently used to describe Microsoft technology. Whether this actually changes that technology is up in the air, as is whether or not the company will adopt other non-alphanumeric characters in the future. "There are probably 10 or 20 characters we haven't used yet, and that's just in ASCII," said Microsoft marketing manager Nick Sane, rumored to have been the inspiration for the paper cat Office Assistant due to his odd habit of licking legal pads. "Imagine what we could do with Unicode! There's a couple thousand there yet we haven't used." Perl self-help guru Tom Christiansen would not comment on this story, but instead was heard to mutter "$#!+". When reached for comment, Perl creator Larry Wall was seen looking through a Unicode book, trying to figure out more convoluted ways to express an item of a list owned by a scalar. Posted on Thu 03 Aug 07:17:53 2000 PDT Written by Matt Behrens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
