🚀 go-pugleaf

One of my favourite stories is this one:

A poor forlorn young girl was trying to learn FORTRAN.  She had great
difficulty with the conceptual difference twixt integer and floating
point variables.  In FORTRAN, the square-root function takes an FP
argument and an integer won't do.  So, she changed all of the lines
saying:

      I = SQRT(131)

to 

      I = SQRT(131.0)

So far so good.  She returned to ask me why this line didn't work:

      J = SQRT(N)

I pointed out that N was an integer, just like 131.  She then changed
the line to this!

      J = SQRT(N.0)

Some people just weren't born to be programmers...

(I hope that's somewhat more amusing than the

      D0 10 I = 1, 10

or the

      IF (A .EQ. B) THEN I = I + 1

stories.)

-- 
Hubert Matthews      ...helping make the world a quote-free zone...

hjm@cernvax.cern.ch   hjm@vxomeg.decnet.cern.ch    ...!mcvax!cernvax!hjm