From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: mah@mhorton.net (Mary Ann Horton) Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2015 18:35:22 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Make love In-Reply-To: References: <1438363410.28192.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <55BD73DA.3010107@mhorton.net> Oh, I remember "Very funny!" It was pr, V6, I think. I wanted to format for a 132 wide printer and I mistakenly typed "pr -132 file" instead of "pr -w132 file". It thought I wanted it formatted in 132 columns of text. I about tore my hair out trying to figure out what "Very funny!" meant. On 07/31/2015 07:42 PM, scj at yaccman.com wrote: > Early Unix had a lot of cryptic messages -- the infamous "eh?", and "very > funny!" were two that I got several times. The make love message in the > earliest make I remember was "Don't know how to make love." > > When working on PCC, I had the unenviable job of producing a C compiler > that would accept all of *077532 = 13, 077532->ack = 13, and device->ack > = 13. As we were trying to get the kernel and applications to declare > addresses more "honestly", we adopted a rule that if you actually used a > structure reference that was type safe, we would require it everywhere in > the file. Since structure members used to be in a single namespace, this > led to some horribly complicated code. In an effort to get it to work, I > festooned it with consistency checks nearly every other line, getting more > and more punchy as I tried to come up with short, unique messages. > > I'll never forget the look on Ken's face when he came to me and asked > "what is a 'gummy structure'?" > > Nowadays, while I'm happy to have some fun with them, I think throwing > humor at people who have just screwed up is playing to a tough audience. > Today, I might have suggested that 'make love' produce something more like > "Don't know how to make love. Can you introduce me to a hot makefile?" > > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs