A Guide To Shooting Yourself In The Foot In Different 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 care 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.\”

Objective C

You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.

Ada

If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defence will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, \”Shoot at his feet.\” Or! After correctly packaging 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 that your foot is of the wrong type.

Algol (60 or 68)

You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

ALGOL 60

You spend hours trying to figure out how to fire the gun since it doesn\’t have any provision for input or output.

ALGOL 68

You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly coerced to void.

APL

You hear a gunshot, and there\’s a hole in your foot, but you don\’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. Or! You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it with fewer characters.

Assembly

You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. Or! You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot.

Basic

Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Visual Basic

You\’ll shoot yourself in the foot, but you\’ll have so much fun doing it that you won\’t care.

Cobol

USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs to be retied. Or! You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun won\’t fire unless it\’s aligned in column 8.

DBase

You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain you\’ve forgotten why you shot yourself anyway.

DBase IV v1.0

You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly- designed grenade and the whole building blows up.

Eiffel

You take out a contract on your foot. The precondition is that there\’s a bullet in the gun, the postcondition is that there\’s a hole in your foot.

Forth

You yourself foot in shoot.

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 anyway because you have no exception-processing ability.

Java

You shoot yourself in the foot. Everyone else who accesses your website leaves hobbling and cursing.

Lisp

You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but the gun jams on a stray parenthesis. Or! You shoot yourself in the appendage that 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…

Scheme

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……but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

Pascal

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

Modula-2

After realising that you can\’t actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.

Perl

You shoot yourself in the foot. You then decide it was so much fun that you invent another six completely different ways to do it.

PL/I

You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing & Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.
Or!
Since the bullet is a different type from your foot, the bullet automatically gets converted to another foot on arrival. It\’s still difficult to walk afterwards.

Prolog

You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in your face.
Or
You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn\’t allow it to explain.

sh, csh, etc.

You can\’t remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.

Smalltalk

You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.
Or!
You shoot yourself in the foot, and your foot sends \”doesNotUnderstand: Pain\” to your brain.

Snobol

You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot). Or! If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

Paradox

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

Revelation

You\’ll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.

English

You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.

Clipper

You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail REAL SOON NOW.

SQL

You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg.

370 JCL

You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep- fried.

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.

HyperTalk

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

Motif

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

FORTE

You cannot shoot yourself in the foot more than once because of circular referencing so you implement an interface to enable you to shoot yourself again and again and again…

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