🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <qtlnvv@unify.uucp> dgh@unify.UUCP (David Harrington) writes:

> This reminds me: remember in the 60's and 70's when we realized that, yes,
> Virginia, the 20th century WILL give way to the 21st, and EVERY DATE ROUTINE
> EVER WRITTEN WILL FAIL?
> All those hard-coded '19' followed by a PIC 99 or XX field.

Well, some will say "1900" (hard 19 caten 99 wrap to 00, lost oflo),
some will say "1000" (hard 1 caten 999 wrap to 000, lost oflo),
some will even say "1'00" (note that ' is immediately after 9 in ASCII :-)

Maybe this is just paranoia, but given American industry's historical record
of spending a little money now to prevent problems in the future, I'm going
to have about a month's worth of paper money in my pocket on Dec 31, 1999...

(For those engineers who had no time to schedule English courses this is
called Irony, or Sardonicism, or Sarcasm, or something...)

There was once a Fortran compiler (actually, it was a Michigan Algorithmic
Decoder - MAD compiler with a bug/feature that it compiled Fortran too, but
that is a different Urban Myth).  It was written by a group of people with
an amazing sense of humor.  It printed pictures of Alfred E. Newman when the
diagnostic count exceeded fifty, it put various historical headings on its
output listing like "Joan of Arc burned at the stake on this day in 15xx".

It also had a dirty word library.  Certain words were not allowed as variable
names.  One day a Poultry Science professor came to call on the designers.
He was not happy.  The compiler graciously allowed him to have an array
named HEN, but was not quite so sanguine about an array named COCK.

-- 
Sig     DS.L    ('ZBen')       ; Ben Cranston <zb...@Trantor.UMD.EDU>
* Network Infrastructures Group, Computer Science Center
* University of Maryland at College Park
* of Ulm