Re: Extentions to BASIC

Here's some more history:

Creators admit UNIX and C is [sic] a hoax
In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kerninghan admitted that the Unix
operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at
the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the
following:
"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the
GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working
with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH
labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity
and power. Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a
hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the
Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics
environment and Pascal.

Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked
at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as
possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels, calling it Unix
as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then
Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called
'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs
with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into
B, BCPL and finally C.

We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and
other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer.

In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in
Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really
guilty about the chaos, confusion, and truly bad programming that have
resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

Major Unix an C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time.
Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools,
including the popular Trubo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they
had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance
their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM
spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a
hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000,
merely stated that 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a cryptic
statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the
Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that
P.T. Barnum was correct.

In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are stating
that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William Gates
concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And IBM
spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product is
an internal prank gone awry.

--
Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
------------------------------------------------------------------
Due to recent budget cuts, the light at the end of the tunnel has
temporarily been turned off.
.

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