HOW TO TELL WHICH PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE YOU'RE USING

(or how to shoot yourself in the foot)

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 guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who find themselves in such dilemmas.

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 bit-wise 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 anyway because you have no exception-handling ability.

COBOL
USEing a COLT45 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 retied.

ALGOL
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

Modula-2
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

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....

Pascal
The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

BASIC
Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Visual Basic
You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.

FORTH
Foot in yourself shoot.

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.

Concurrent Euclid
You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

HyperTalk
Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you.
Answer the result.

Motif
You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get round to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

Unix

% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm:.o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

Paradox
Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.

Prolog
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain.

XBase
Shooting yourself is no problem. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, you'll have to use Clipper.

PL/I
You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.

370 JCL
You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000 page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Assembly
You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot. You pain-stakingly design, engineer and build a gun, turn the shells on a lathe, and prime them by hand. You then shoot yourself in the foot, but very quickly.

Java
You get the gun and take aim. After pulling the trigger you are told you don't have permission to shoot yourself in the foot.

perl
You read your entire body into a small target and match everything that resembles feet, replacing them with shot ones. It's possible to do this with a single compact handmade gun, of which you can barely figure out were to put the bullets by the time you finish building it.

INGRES
You pull the trigger, and your identical twin in San Francisco gets shot. You then turn off distributed query optimization.

VMS

     $ MOUNT/DENSITY=.45/LABEL=BULLET/MESSAGE="BYE"
     BULLET::BULLET$GUN SYS$BULLET
     $ SET GUN/LOAD/SAFETY=OFF/SIGHT=NONE/HAND=LEFT/CHAMBER=1/
     ACTION=AUTOMATIC/LOG/ALL/FULL SYS$GUN_3$DUA3:[000000]GUN.GUN
     $ SHOOT/LOG/AUTO SYS$GUN SYS$SYSTEM:[FOOT]FOOT.FOOT

     %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image GUN
     -CLI-E-IMGNAME, image file $3$DUA240:[GUN]GUN.EXE;1
     -IMGACT-F-NOTNATIVE, image is not an OpenVMS Alpha AXP image

Windows9x

             d:\setup