Foot Shooting
H C Pumphrey
Isn't it quiet in here.....
I'm posting to see if anyone knows the history and origins of the
"shoot yourself in the foot" piece included below.
This version was posted to alt.hackers very recently by Adrian Dunn
(ADDunn at freenet dot co dot uk) but I'm sure that
(a) it is much older than that and
(b) it has been changed quite a bit.
For a start, Mr Dunn added the Java and Fortran 90 items himself,
but I'm sure I remember seeing an earlier version about six years ago
and that it included an Algol 60 entry which went roughly like this:
Algol 60: You shoot yourself in the foot with a flintlock musket.
The musket is aesthetically pleasing and the doctor is mystified
by the exit wound.
I also recall the FORTH entry being "yourself foot shoot" but I could be
wrong. I can feel a perl entry coming on, too.......
Hugh
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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 bitwise
copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's
me, over there."
FORTRAN 77: 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 facility.
FORTRAN 90: Shoot yourself in every toe of every foot with a
single pull of the trigger.
Modula-2: After realizing that you can't actually accomplish
anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.
COBOL: USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEFT.FOOT, THEN place
ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return
HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.
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
...
BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On big
systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
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.
Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.
SNOBOL: If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you
fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of the gun into the foot left of
leg of you. Answer the result.
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.
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.
Java: Shoot yourself in the foot using any combination of gun and
bullet, in theory. In practice using certain companies bullets
with other companies guns can cause the whole thing to blow up in
your face. At this point shooting yourself in the foot is
irrelevant.
**************************************************************************
--
==========================================================================
Hugh C. Pumphrey | Telephone 0131-650-6026
Department of Meteorology | FAX 0131-650-5780
The University of Edinburgh | Replace 0131 with +44-131 if outside U.K.
EDINBURGH EH9 3JZ, Scotland | Email h...@met.ed.ac.uk
OBDisclaimer: The views expressed herein are mine, not those of UofE.
==========================================================================
Bastiaan Zapf
>wrong. I can feel a perl entry coming on, too.......
How about an APL entry?
"You shoot yourself in the foot. If you want to shoot yourself into the
other foot, you can't find the place where the left foot was specified."
--
Basti
SR HP: http://home.t-online.de/home/b.zapf
Barry Margolin
Bastiaan Zapf <B.Z...@t-online.de> wrote:
>>I also recall the FORTH entry being "yourself foot shoot" but I could be
>>wrong. I can feel a perl entry coming on, too.......
>
>How about an APL entry?
>
>"You shoot yourself in the foot. If you want to shoot yourself into the
>other foot, you can't find the place where the left foot was specified."
The message already had a better APL entry.
--
Barry Margolin, bar...@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
rap...@research.canon.com.au
BULLET FOOT !
because ! is pronounced BANG and stores the BULLET in the FOOT.
This list cropped up in rec.arts.int-fiction recently and they thought
up examples for the languages they use there.
Tim McDonough
(H C Pumphrey) writes:
> I'm posting to see if anyone knows the history and origins of the "shoot
> yourself in the foot" piece included below.
I've kept some personal favorites from rec.humor.funny posts, and I believe
jokes along these lines have shown up in May of 1990, June of 1990, September
of 1990, and then July of 1992... Maybe DejaNews or some other
rec.humor.funny archive could find more of them of an original attribution...
-Tim
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
summer of 65 I was working on construction project in the backwoods of
idaho up in the bitterroots not too far from lolo pass. the cabin i
was staying at was not too far from a nearby bar. the bartender had
been a fastdraw in some sort of show at one time. periodically people
would have a lot to drink and go out back and he would practice
drawing and shooting across the river. once or twice he came very
close to hitting his foot (and the story was that he had actually shot
his foot doing this sometime in the past).
--
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler | ly...@adcomsys.net, ly...@garlic.com
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ http://www.adcomsys.net/lynn