All Things Being Equal?

ABSTRACT

By the time these belles-lettres reach you, a brand new year will be upon us. “Another Year! Another Mighty Blow!” as Tennyson thundered. Or as Humphrey Lyttelton (q.g.)1 might say, “The odious odometer of Time has clicked up another ratchette of entropic torture.” Less fancifully, as well as trying hard not to write 2007 on our checks, many of us will take the opportunity to reflect on all the daft things we did last year and resolve not to do them no more.2 Not to mention all the nice things we failed to do. I have in mind the times when I missed an essential semicolon, balanced by the occasions when inserting a spurious one was equally calamitous. Surely any half-decent computer language should know where my statements are meant to terminate, and then properly redistribute the punctuation provided? The smarter Lisps became good at DWIM (do what I mean), balancing those damned, spurious parentheses. But I digress, having planted a topic known to incite reader feedback.3

REFERENCES

• 1: I introduce q.g. (quod google) to supplement, if not replace, the archaic q.v. (quod vide). Recall that vide, pronounced veeday, is the second person singular imperative of videre (to see). So quod vide is really a bossy cross-reference command to "look it up, or woe betides!" In the same way, mandating that googlere (to google) is a regular second conjugation verb, quod google is to be pronounced kwad googlay, and to be ignored at your peril. In this instance, your search for Lyttelton, or Humph to his many fans, will be well rewarded.
• 2: Misinformed prescriptionist pop-grammarians continue to attack the double negative as ignorant and barbaric. They wrongly assume that natural language must always follow the logic of Boolean algebra, where not-true means false and not-not-true means true. In fact, piling on the negatives is an idiomatic survival of earlier standards, to be taken as simple emphasis and reinforcement as in the famous triple-negative of Chaucer: He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde. One is reminded here of the French ne-pas and ne-jamais constructions, blessed by custom and l'academie.
• 3: An ancient, shameless ploy of lonely columnists. My own surefire triggers over the years include any mention of GOTO or APL. More recently, sudoku has proved a hot button. When A. L. (Bert) Lloyd edited Picture Post, he could always drum up letters from blistering Berkshire Brigadiers by planting debates on whether dogs should be allowed to attend church.
• 4: Edsger W. Dijkstra, Letters to the editor: go to statement considered harmful, Communications of the ACM, v.11 n.3, p.147-148, March 1968 [doi>10.1145/362929.362947]
• 5: Inside Risks; http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/insiderisks05.html.
• 6: News summary by Jean Wasp, SSU's media relations coordinator; http://www.sonoma.edu/pubs/newsrelease/archives/001090.html.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  A. General Literature
  A.m MISCELLANEOUS

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.m Miscellaneous