Edward Mokurai wrote:
> I wrote another joke of this kind in APL News once long ago, > concerning a utility for printing sideways on fan-fold paper. It is > not difficult to prove that any computable function can be written in > one line of APL, and this provided a way of printing it. A single box > of 5000 sheets of fanfold paper was not quite a mile long. > > This is the sort of thing that got me my own entry in Stan > Kelly-Bootle's Computer Contradictionary, along with a two-page > article consisting entirely of empty array jokes for use in teaching, > as suggested by Jim Brown, then of IBM; and winning one of Stan's > programming contests in Unix Review. The programming contest was for > the maximum ratio of error text to program text. I submitted the APL > version of > > ".x=.'".x' > > which fills memory with stack frames, and then sets about displaying > them all in the WS FULL or equivalent error message. Again, this is > both joke and fact. APL implementors use such expressions to test the > quality of their memory handling, in particular whether they have > saved enough memory in WS FULL situations to handle generating the > error message--obviously without creating it as an object in the > workspace first. > This contradictionary sounds like lots of fun. Do you remember by any chance was there any entry about one-dimensional array of (strictly) non-negative integers whose rank is greater than or equal to one? Perhaps even better: one-dimensional empty array of non-negative numbers whose rank is strictly greater than 1? I've counted 4 contradictions: 1) 1d empty array, 2) empty array of numbers, 3) 1d array with rank > 1 4) empty array with rank > 1 Of course, by mixing the above 4 we can derive some more, like "empty array of numbers with rank > 1", etc, but those I wouldn't count except for the combinatorial fun factor bonus. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Re%3A-CS-Jokes-%28was-Re%3A-Functors-in-mathematics%2C-Haskell-and-an-example-in-J%29-tp33545036s24193p33545036.html Sent from the J Programming mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
