A Programming Task

WARNING: geek humor ahead...

Solutions in various languages:

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:

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 with the attempts to shoot yourself anyways because you have no exception-handling capability.

Pascal:

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

Ada:

After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover you can't because your foot is of the wrong type.

COBOL:

USE HANDGUN.COLT.45. AIM AT LEG.FOOT. PLACE RM.HAND.FINGER ON HANDGUN.COLT.45.TRIGGER. SQUEEZE HANDGUN.COLT.45.TRIGGER. RETURN HANDGUN.COLT.45 TO HOLSTER.

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 the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...

FORTH:

Foot in yourself shoot.

Prolog:

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

MUMPS:

You shoot yourself with steel-tipped hollow-point AK-47 bullets in even-numbered toes on your left foot, and in odd-numbered toes on your right foot all with one line of code. Then you shoot yourself in the head when it's time to modify that line.

BASIC:

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

Visual Basic:

You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have had so much fun doing it that you won't care.

HyperTalk:

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

Motif:

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

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.

Unix:

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

Concurrent Euclid:

You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

370 JCL:

You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Paradox:

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

Access:

You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.

Revelation:

You're sure you're going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these nifty little bullet-thingies are for.

Assembler:

1. You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot.
2. Using only 7 bytes of code, you blow off your entire leg in only 2 CPU clock ticks.

Modula2:

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

Perl:       gdm

There are so many ways to shoot yourself in the foot that you post a query to comp.lang.perl.misc to determine the optimal approach. After sifting through 500 replies (which you accomplish with a short perl script), not to mention the cross-posts to the perl5-porters mailing list (for which you upgraded your first sifter into a package, which of course you uploaded to CPAN for others who might have a similar problem, which, of course, is the problem of sorting out email and news, not the problem of shooting yourself in the foot), you set to the task of simply and elegantly shooting yourself in the foot, until you discover that, while it works fine in most cases, NT, VMS, and various flavors of Linux, AIX, and Irix all shoot you in the foot sooner than your perl script could.

Then you decide you can do it better with the new, threaded version...

INTERCAL:

You ask the compiler to please load the gun and do place your foot in the trajectory of the bullet, but the compiler gives up.

JAVA:

You can load the gun, but you can't actually point it at your foot.

MS Visual C++:

Instatiate an object of the CShootOwnFoot class. This will shoot your foot just fine as long as you have your own Microsoft Revolver(tm)- check your system directory for msrlvr32.dll.

Note (by dah) that to run msrlvr32.dll you will have to download Internet Explorer 4.0 first, although you may continue to use any browser. The service pack 3-A, which must be installed over service pack 2 unless service pack 1 was installed, is available for download also. Finally, you should exit all applications and back up your registry before attempting to shoot yourself in the foot. After shooting your foot, you will need the Win95 CDROM and have to reboot your system.

Note that the FootChute service for Win95 will only shoot little toes. To shoot entire feet, you will need the FootEnterprise package which runs only on NT Server, available separately.

Pay-by-call help is available in the case of a stuck or jammed msrlvr32.dll

Note: knowledge base article 345 is available to Premier Subscribers which discusses problems some customers have had distinuishing the "muzzle" from the "handle", symptoms of which include failure to damage your foot and occasional holes to hardware systems in the immediate area, despite apparently correct functioning of the dll. The spurious holes apparently do not recurr once the muzzle/handle swap has been made.