Elephant Hunt
Computer scientists hunt elephants by executing Algorithm A:
{Go to Africa
Start at the Cape of Good Hop
Crossing Africa from south to north
bidirectional in east-west direction
Do while crossing
{
Catch every animal you see
Compare each trapped animal with an animal known as elephant
stop on agreement
}
}
Experienced programmers change Algorithm A by placing an animal known as Elephant in Cairo, so that the program will end properly in any case.
Assembler programmers prefer to run Algorithm A on their hands and knees.
SQL programmers use the following expression:
SELECT Elephant FROM Africa.
NATURAL programmers get an elephant from ADABAS.
LOGO programmers were riding through Africa on their turtle.
COBOL programmers do this on a dinosaur.
BASIC programmers prefer to do this in a velvet-padded single-hauler with the brakes constantly tightened.
C programmers first use sizeof() to determine the amount of memory needed by an elephant, attempting to allocate it, forgetting to check the result and then shoot the elephant with wild pointers.
C ++ programmers insist that the elephant is a class, so they have to bring their own catching methods. And if the elephant should leave Africa, then automatically its destructor is triggered.
PASCAL programmers first mark a point on the map, then write END in front of it and dream of Nicholas Wirth being trampled by an elephant.
MODULA programmers import an elephant from a zoo.
DELPHI programmers download a TElephant component from the Internet and get as many elephants as they like by calling the virtual constructor: Elephant:= TElephant.Create(MySelf)
LISP programmers build a maze of brackets and hope the elephant gets lost in it.
Mathematicians hunt elephants by going to Africa, removing everything that is not an elephant and catching a remnant element.
Experienced mathematicians will first try to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate practice task.
Mathematics professors prove the existence of at least one non-degenerate elephant and then leave the tracking and trapping of an actual elephant to their students.
Engineers hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching every gray animal that comes their way and taking it as an elephant if the weight does not deviate more than 15% from that of a previously captured elephant.
Economists do not hunt elephants. But they are convinced that the elephants would turn themselves in if they pay them enough.
Statisticians hunt the first animal they see n times and call it an elephant.
Business consultants do not hunt elephants - and many have never hunted anything. But you can hire them by the hour to get good advice.
System analysts would theoretically be able to determine the correlation between hat size and hit rate in elephant hunting if only someone would tell them what an elephant is.
SAP system engineers declare the first-best animal to be an elephant and adapt the idea of an elephant to this animal.
MICROSOFT buys an elephant from the Seattle Zoo, copies it in bulk, speaks to the world that everyone needs one, and that it is the perfect complement to MS Office, and exports 14 million copies to Africa.