In article <i37ire$7g...@panix5.panix.com>, a...@pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote:
> http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/May/stroustrup.html The same story has been floating around for eons, just with the names changed. I saw one where Wirth was ostensibly making fun of the people who didn't understand that Pascal was all just a joke. I'm sure if you go back far enough, you can find a McCarthy / Lisp version. It probably goes something like, "So, anyway, we tried to figure out what was the most absurd way to abuse punctuation we could imagine. Somebody suggested that every program would have to end with 37 close parentheses. When we finally stopped laughing, we started sketching out a grammar on the chalkboard that would let us do that". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list