Shooting Elephants

[Guest.Visitor]

Found on a news group: A group of programmers, each with different language skills, was given the job of writing a program to Shoot Elephants. RESULTS Pascal pgm got a compile error; #include .... elephant.h not found. "C" pgm compiled but had run time error; ARRAY pointer, out of array bounds, negative, or points to memory in another machine. After 6 months of design effort, the COBOL programmer was in the middle of a nested, IF this-is-an-elephant then IF gun-is-loaded then perform aim-gun-at-elephant thru pull-trigger else goto get-more-ammo ...... --rest of code missing; elephant charged and trampled programmer. RPG program not possible; e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t longer than six bytes. REXX version: Shoot(elephant,dead)

[Guest.Visitor]

The RPGIII version could look like this one. Better viewed in an attached .txt file. C LOAD BULLET GUN 25 C* C *IN25 DOWEQ*OFF 25: No more bullets C* C SHOOTGUN ELEPHN 26 C *IN26 IFEQ *OFF Missed C LEAVE C ENDIF C* C LOAD BULLET GUN 25 C C ENDDO

[Guest.Visitor]

The RPG programmer wrote the program in 1 line by defining the elephant gun as a primary file. Unfortunately, an elephant gun doesn't return EOF, so the gun is still firing. Barbara Morris

[Guest.Visitor]

Barbara, Thanks for your input. Hey, this is an RPG Open Source code, anyone is invited to improve it :) You know those arguments against gun control like - "the gun does not shoot itself....." The SHOOT opcode means that someone have to pull the trigger.

[Guest.Visitor]

It would be GUN LOAD BULLET in RPG; Remember everything is backwards; This helps improve your memory as you are writing the stuff.

[Guest.Visitor]

Thanks for the good chuckle, you folks!