A magazine that many
hackers assume all suits read. Used to question an unbelieved
quote, as in "Did you read that in `Datamation?'" (But see
below; this slur may be dated by the time you read this.) It used
to publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like
the original paper on COME FROM in 1973, and Ed Post's
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" ten years later, but for
a long time after that it was much more exclusively
suit-oriented and boring. Following a change of editorship in
1994, Datamation is trying for more of the technical content and
irreverent humor that marked its early days.
Datamation now has a WWW page at http://www.datamation.com
worth visiting for its selection of computer humor, including
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" and the `Bastard Operator
From Hell' stories by Simon Travaglia (see BOFH).
COME FROM n.
A semi-mythical language construct dual to the
`go to' COME FROM <label> would cause the referenced label
to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached
it control would quietly and automagically be transferred to
the statement following the COME FROM....
Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by
Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional
tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily
to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus
extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of
view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
became the ancestor of a large family of languages including
Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l
summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly
funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
