A Sense Of Humor On The Keyboards Tongue-in-cheek Programming Takes A Lighthearted Look At Standard Languages

February 8, 1986|By Henry Kisor, Special to The Sentinel

It's not true, no matter what you may have heard, that computer enthusiasts have no sense of humor. A case in point are some tongue-in-cheek programming languages invented by writers for a New Jersey PC Club newsletter.

According to Newsbytes, a weekly electronic computer industry publication, the New Jerseyites have come up with such competitors to BASIC, COBOL and ALGOL (those last two are professional programming languages) as SIMPLE, SLOBOL and VALGOL.

SIMPLE (an acronym for Sheer Idiots Monopurpose Programming Linguistic Environment) has only three commands: BEGIN, END and STOP. Developed at ''Hanover College for Technological Misfits,'' this language was designed to make it impossible to write programs with errors in them.

''Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful,'' says the newsletter. ''They thus achieve the result of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.''

Meanwhile, SLOBOL is distinguished by its slowness. Although many programs allow you to take a coffee break, SLOBOL lets you ''travel to Bolivia to pick the coffee. Forty-three programmers are known to have died of boredom sitting at their terminals while waiting for a SLOBOL program to compile.''

The most interesting new language, however, is VALGOL.

''From its modest beginnings in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, VALGOL is enjoying a dramatic surge of popularity across the industry. VALGOL commands include REALLY, LIKE, WELL, and Y'KNOW. Variables are assigned with the

LIKE and

TOTALLY operators. Other operators include the California Boolean, FERSURE and NOWAY. Repetitions of code are handled in FOR - SURE loops.

''VALGOL is characterized by its unfriendly error messages. For example, when the user makes a syntax error, the interpreter the core program displays the message ''GAG ME WITH A SPOON.''

Meanwhile, the wizards at Massachussetts Institute of Technology and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have been compiling a glossary of computer jargon that has been appearing on electronic bulletin boards everywhere. Many of its entries are hilarious. A few:


BAGBITER 1. (noun). Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. BAGBITING (adj). Failing hardware or software. ''This bagbiting system won't let me get out of Spacewar.'' Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of ''biting the bag.''

BARF 1. (interj). Term of disgust. 2. (verb). Choke, as on input. May mean to give an error message. ''The function '

' compares two fixnums or two flonums, and barfs on anything else.'' 3. BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS: (adj). Said of something which would make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons.


COKEBOTTLE (noun). Any very unusual character typed from the keyboard. MIT people complain about the ''control-meta-cokebottle'' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complain about the ''altmode-altmode-cokebottl e'' commands at MIT.

FLUSH (verb). 1. To delete something, usually superfluous. ''All that nonsense has been flushed.'' 2. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for a meal). ''I'm going to flush now.''

JIFFY (noun). 1. Interval of CPU time, commonly 1/60 second or 1 millisecond. 2. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. ''I'll do it in a jiffy'' means certainly not now and possibly never.

SPLAT (noun). 1. Name used in many places for the ASCII star (" ") or asterisk character.

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