GNUtools/emacs/etc/NICKLES.WORTH - annotate

Return to NICKLES.WORTH CVS log

Up to [Apple XNU] / GNUtools / emacs / etc

Annotation of GNUtools/emacs/etc/NICKLES.WORTH, revision 1.1.1.1

1.1 root 1: Article from _Computer Language_ by Bruce Tonkin.
2:
3: Several prominent software companies have caused a stir lately by dropping
4: all development work in Pascal and adopting Microsoft BASIC. When queried all
5: have declined to comment about this move, but one company insider (code-named
6: Deep Poke) suggested talking to Niklaus Wirth to get the full story.
7: Speaking from his home in Zurich, Switzerland, Wirth proved to be a far
8: more genial soul than one might imagine, being the founder of Pascal and all.
9: But the European lifestyle obviously agrees with him, and he was more than
10: willing to provide some insights into this strange phenomenon, currently taking
11: place in the computer industry.
12: In fact, what began as an innocent inquiry eventually revealed a shocking
13: and exclusive piece of information: that the invention of Pascal nearly 20
14: years ago was intended entirely as a joke, an April Fools' prank.
15: Wirth tried to explain. "Every year at the Swiss Federal Institute for
16: Technology [the university in Zurich where Wirth is a professor of computer
17: science] I taught the same classes, gave the same tests, told the same
18: jokes," he began. "it was boring. I needed a little humor. So I started
19: talking about this crazy language called Pascal. Eventually, the Pascal joke
20: became so popular I just kept adding to it, making it more and more elaborate.
21: "But some of the students went to class so seldom that they missed the
22: joke and thought Pascal was a real language! Imagine the looks on their faces
23: when they got out into the world and discovered there was no such thing as a
24: language called Pascal. Hoo-boy! They sure learned to pay attention after
25: that!" he said, giggling.
26: Several of his better students, he continued, figured they'd make some
27: money by fleecing the people who actually believed in Pascal and so wrote a
28: simple Pascal compiler for this purpose. It was actually a kind of prank, much
29: like selling elevator passes to high school freshmen.
30: "Yes, yes," Wirth said, "the UCSD operating system started the same way.
31: The same bunch of rascals who did the whole Pascal thing kept pushing the idea
32: until it reached the point of complete absurdity. They were hysterical!
33: Especially late at night - they'd come up with some really boffo material.
34: They the next week they'd modify it and it would get even more entertaining."
35: Wirth's best student was Philippe Kahn, who he met while Kahn was a
36: student. "I used to go to a small bistro called 'Der Blaue Engel' after my
37: classes, and it happened that Kahn played jazz saxophone there while people
38: danced on the tables." Wirth was impressed with Kahn's talent and evident wit
39: and encouraged him to end his musical career and enter the lucrative field of
40: software comedy. Once he explained Pascal's comedic possibilities, Kahn was
41: hooked and quickly agreed.
42: Since most of the staff at Apple Computer Inc. was educated at the
43: University of California at San Diego, they were also in on the joke, Wirth
44: said. "That's why they kept pushing Pascal. A bunch of fine kids, those Apple
45: guys. Born comedians, most of them. Except this one guy - he had no sense
46: of humor at all. [Editor's hint: not Woz.]
47: "When we finally decided to do a DOS that was even funnier than UCSD
48: Pascal, the feeling was that UCSD was already the ultimate. But then one of
49: the guys proposed doing a DOS that was written in Pascal but used hieroglyphics
50: instead of a written language. What a genius! We were rolling in the aisles.
51: But that one guy, he thought we were serious. What a nerd!"
52: Wirth's list of the funniest features of Pascal begins with the lack of a
53: string data type, no random file access, primitive numeric handling, and the
54: existential absurdity of the semicolon.
55: "But I'd have to say that my crowning achievement was the lack of input
56: and output functions. First you can't get anything in too easy. And once it's
57: in, you can't do much with it. Pascal isn't good with letters and it's not
58: good at all with numbers. Besides, I made it very picky. You have to
59: recompile, recompile, recompile forever. Ha! And once you've done something
60: with the data, you can't get it out." Wirth started chuckling uncontrollably.
61: "Philippe has said C is a write-only language - I made Pascal a read-only
62: language!" His chuckling turned into hysterical laughter that went on for
63: several minutes.
64: "Of course, some didn't get the joke," he finally said when he could speak
65: again. "They kept trying to make Pascal actually useful. But I stopped them;
66: I made the original Pascal a standard. That meant anyone who made Pascal good
67: for anything was nonstandard and out on a limb!"
68:
69: * * * * *
70:
71: How will all this affect the future of Modula-2? Wirths' merry manner
72: and beaming face suddenly became hard when presented with this question;
73: perhaps this was taboo territory, sacred subject matter.
74: "Modula-2 is a real language," he finally said, his demeanor solemn. "It
75: represents a serious effort on my part to make amends for any damage caused by
76: well-meaning but unimaginative people teaching and learning Pascal.
77: "But it's so hard! Pascal is a very good joke, yes? But to make a really
78: good language from it is not so easy," he sighed.
79: In addition to Pascal, Wirth admitted, three other languages also were
80: intended as pranks: Forth, PL/I, and True BASIC.
81: "Forth is essentially black humor," Wirth said. "Charles Moore [who
82: created the language in the late 1960s] designed it as a native language for
83: people whose brains ran backward." Originally, he continued, it was supposed
84: to be the ultimate parody of Hewlett-Packard calculators, which Moore has been
85: competing with unsuccessfully for years. As an astronomer, he had used HP's
86: calculators out of necessity rather than any appreciation for their design.
87: But to his great surprise, he found that there were actually quite a few
88: people whose brains did run in reverse. Eventually, Moore came to see Forth
89: as a boon, especially for backward thinkers. "At least it keeps them of the
90: streets out of really serious trouble," Wirth said. "Imagine one of them
91: trying to drive a car or operate heavy machinery!"
92: PL/I originally stood for "Prostituted Language/Interface," Wirth
93: explained. "The designers were under so much pressure to add features and
94: include every possible construction from every other language in existence that
95: they eventually gave up and decided to play the whole thing for laughs. They
96: said 'yes' to every request, no matter how absurd, and even added things to
97: the language no one ever could or would use. The scoured journals for
98: off-beat syntax and weird symbolic notation; some of their better ideas came
99: from early editions of The Mad Reader and other E. C. publications. Besides,
100: several of them were upset with the compiler-writing team and decided to stick
101: it to them with a life-time project."
102: True BASIC is not "True" in the sense most people understand the word,
103: Wirth continued. Rather, "True" is itself an acronym for a "Totally wRecked-Up
104: Example of." The professors who came up with it are amazed that no one has
105: yet caught on to the joke; they felt sure their insistence on the LET keyword
106: would be a dead giveaway. "Of course there were other clues, but this was the
107: most clear-cut," Wirth said. "They even called Microsoft BASIC a street
108: BASIC in hopes that Bill Gates would challenge them and reveal the joke."
109: But Gates refused to play along, and both professors had to all but beg Wirth
110: to tell the world the truth about True BASIC before things went any further.
111:
112: * * * * *
113:
114: Jokes abound in the world of operating systems as well, according to
115: Wirth. In addition to the UCSD Pascal operating system, said Wirth, "Tandy,
116: Apple, and Commodore were for a number of years carrying out a private comedic
117: battle to see who could produce the world's funniest DOS."
118: Tandy's TRS-DOS (Tandy Radio Signal Detection Operating System - a
119: reference to the fact that early machines would reboot when any transmitted
120: signal was detected) was an early front-runner until Apple came out with the
121: vary amusing Control-D command what could enable or disable disk operations.
122: In the end, though, Commodore won the battle. Its DOS was oriented toward
123: records exactly the size of punch cards and took over four minutes to boot from
124: disk since it read disk data more slowly than most audio tape machines and even
125: some 300-baud modems.
126: But the funniest joke of all is, in Wirth's estimation, also the most
127: common, and he's amazed so few people have caught on to it yet.
128: "Come on, come on. Surely you can guess," he said, his voice rising in
129: excitement. "What one thing makes users more livid than any other? What one
130: computer product makes you feel sure it was produced by a team of trained
131: gerbils on mind-altering drugs? Yes, yes, yes! You see it now - manuals!"
132: Wirth considers Gates, who wrote all the BASIC manuals and who was on the
133: staff of many others, a "comic genius." "Mitch Kapor should get more
134: recognition - he's far better than Neil Simon. And what's-his-name, the guy
135: who wrote the WordStar manual - he got an award at at dinner we threw for
136: him a few years back. That manual is a classic in the truest Marxist
137: [brothers] sense of the word! Pure slapstick! But the best of them all is the
138: author of the dBase II manual. Now there is a writer for the ages!"
139: As for the IBM manuals, Wirth considers them mere hack work. "Anyone can
140: do stuff like that," he snorted.
141: But perusing a copy of the manual for NEWDOS, he seemed a little more
142: impressed. "Hmmmm. Not bad work. Not bad at all," he said. "But it's still
143: simple stuff. 'To do this, read page 40. But to know what's on page 40, you
144: have to read page 65, which refers to page 15, which shows a whole list of
145: exceptions for page 53.' Entertaining, but hardly in the class of any of the
146: modern masters of the art." But when his attention was brought to the fact
147: that none of the error numbers listed in the NEWDOS manual were ever returned
148: to the BASIC programmer, and that the most common disk setup (double-density,
149: double-sided) was not on the configuration menu, Wirth admitted that these were
150: indeed nice touches.
151: Although it is a known fact that most of the early computer manuals
152: (probably even the NEWDOS manual) were written by programmers and that
153: programmers are notoriously poor writers, Wirth would not be deterred from his
154: opinion that these writings are works of art.
155: "Most people fail to consider that good programmers are very bright.
156: Their thoughts are extremely well organized and most of them have the benefit
157: of higher education. Their brains are not warped by overexposure to TV and
158: their attention spans are not short-circuited by overindulgence in sex, drugs,
159: or alcohol. They are not constrained by conventionality. If you want to get
160: picky, there are a lot more programmers than there ever were writers. And
161: programmers simply work harder than writers. Few writers work 100 hours a
162: week; almost all programmers do."
163: The result, according to Wirth? "All programmers write at least as well
164: as Faulkner. Most are as good as Proust, and about a third are as good as
165: Dickens. Several hundred are at least as good as Shakespeare. So the manuals
166: you thought were inferior were simply beyond your poor ability to appreciate.
167: If you were a programmer, you would delight in their verbal virtuosity," he
168: said.
169: In fact, Wirth claimed, even the grammatical errors and misspellings in
170: the manuals were placed there deliberately. Most are elaborate literary
171: allusions and puns; some are inventive Joycean neologisms. As an example,
172: Wirth discussed the history of the word "kernal."
173: "Everyone, including programmers, knows the word is spelled k-e-r-n-e-l,"
174: he explained. "The deliberate misspelling is an implied criticism of the
175: typesetter (a writer's bane for years.) Of course typesetters kern the letter
176: l; thus, 'kern el.' But kerning can only be done for certain letter
177: combinations, such as two l's. Thus, 'kern a l' dares the typesetter to kern
178: an isolated l, an obvious typographic impossibility.
179: "Moreover," he continued, "'kernal' is an anagram for 'rankle,' which
180: describes programmers' feelings toward typesetters. Finally the inventor of
181: this particular word, R. K. Lane (who is well known within the Southern
182: California computer community) has concealed his name by means of yet another
183: anagram."
184: Wirth smiled a last secretive smile, leaving us all to wonder if this was
185: perhaps just one more in his series of personal computer pranks.
186:
187:
188:

unix.superglobalmegacorp.com

This archive runs on limited infrastructure. Preserving old code on modern bandwidth. Automated agents are requested to crawl responsibly.