Heard about the Dining Philosopher who evaded resource starvation by sending letter bombs to his neighbours? Or copy 722 of Dante's Inferno, which has a Circle of Hell especially for computer science Ph.D.'s whose theses exceed a hundred pages? Or the joke by induction? It goes like this: "if you thought that last joke was funny wait until you hear the next one". I 've just chanced upon a Cornell University technical report containing scripts for computer science revues, years 1977 to 1981. It's TR82-482, Opening Night at Upson Hall (Scripts from Holiday Party Skits), also here as OCR'd text rather than PDF image. One sketch shows us a student, who earlier in the script was regretting that all he knows is Cornell's teaching language PL/C, ordering a language at Corky Cartwright's All-Language Cafeteria:

CONCROFT: Morning.
Corky: Morning.
CONCROFT: Well, what ya got?
Corky: Well, there's Bliss and Algol; Bliss, Snobol and Algol; Bliss and LISP; Bliss, Algol and LISP; Bliss, Algol, Snobol and LISP; LISP, Algol, Snobol and LISP; LISP, Bliss, LISP, LISP, Algol and LISP; LISP, Snobol, LISP, LISP, LISP, Algol, LISP, APL and LISP; LISP, LISP, LISP, Bliss and LISP; LISP, LISP, LISP, LISP, LISP, LISP, Russell, LISP, LISP, LISP and LISP; (pause) Or Algol68, fully implemented with true parallelism, automatic proof checking, complete runtime support, enhanced with message passing and multiprocessor synchronization and error repair, written in LISP.
ELIJAH: Have you got anything without LISP?

December 20, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/computer-science-revues-at-cornells-upso/228701002

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