A Lisp programmer walks into a room
Lassi Kortela 15 Sep 2020 19:42 UTC
> CL's room
<http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_room.htm>
This is now one of my favorite specifications of all time:
"(room nil) prints out a minimal amount of information. (room t) prints
out a maximal amount of information."
Apparently the TRS-80 was also delightfully vague. Perhaps Arthur can
confirm:
"Our high school used to have TRS-80 computers. They had exactly 2 error
messages: "what?" and "how?". what? meant a syntax error, and how? meant
no syntax error, but some limit had been exceeded. The thing is, these
made more sense than most [error messages]"