The Clarion Challenge: Shoot Yourself In The Foot

Posted March 23 2000

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From time to time Clarion Magazine holds programming contests. Inspired by a discussion in the Topspeed.Topic.General newsgroup, we've decided to do something a bit different. The following is one version of a popular description of how to use various languages to shoot yourself in the foot. Conspicuously missing is an entry for Clarion. 

Task: Shoot yourself in the foot

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 assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others saying "That's me, over there."

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 with the attempts to shoot yourself anyways because you have no exception handling capability.

Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Ada: After correctly packing 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 you can't because your foot is of the wrong type.

COBOL: Using a COLT 45 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 re-tied.

LISP: 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...

FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot.

Prolog: You tell the program that you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't permit it to explain it to you.

BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On large systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Visual Basic: You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have had so much fun doing it that you won't care.

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

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

APL: You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400 page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Paradox: Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too!

Access: You try and point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all of your distribution disks instead.

Revelation: You're sure you're going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these nifty little bullet-thingies are for.

Assembler: You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot.

Modula-2: After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

Clarion: Yeah, why is it missing? Compose your Clarion version of the shoot-self-in-foot task and send it in. I'll post the best entries in an upcoming issue.