On Mon, 14 May 2012 11:20:37 -0400, Sean Conner <s...@conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Peter Corlett once stated: > > On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 10:48:13AM -0700, Michael G Schwern wrote: > > > > > > * Use the same function for two totally different things. > > > * eval BLOCK; eval STRING > > > * select FILEHANDLE; select BITS, BITS, BITS, TIMEOUT > > > > Don't forget the three forms of goto: "ugly but useful performance hack", > > "break out the BASIC interpreter and fondue set, it's eighties night", and > > "computed GOTO, just kill me now!" > > Are you kidding? It can get much worse than that. I came across a > language [1] that allows for patterm matched random GOSUBs (and that's the > general case---it can do GOSUBs like other langauges, but it can also do > random GOSUBS, calculated GOSUBs, and pattern matched GOSUBs with randomness > thrown in for free). > > I am not making that up. > > And the overall syntax gives the sendmail.cf format a run for its money > (I'm still not sure which one is worse---at least the documentation for > sendmail.cf is easily obtainable, unlike the language I came across). > > -spc (Oh, and variables aren't named but numbered ... ) > > [1] INRAC. As far as I can tell, it was only used in two projects: > Racter [2] and Star Alpha [3]. > > [2] Not so much Artificial Intelligence as it is Artificial Insanity. > It can be quite amusing at times. > > [3] I think it's some tutorial software in writing poetry. I'm not sure > as I haven't run it yet. Reminds me of an April-fools article introducing "COME FROM" to the language to ease debugging. In the end of that article they also described "COME FROM ON ...". Hilarious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM http://www.fortran.com/come_from.html -- H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using perl5.00307 .. 5.14 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
