Shooting yourself in the foot, a contribution

[Derek Elkins]

On Sun, 18 May 2003 16:00:40 +0200
Alain Cremieux <alcremi@pobox.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> If I may contribute to the language definitions 
> (http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/language/index.htm), concerning 
> *Haskell* :
> 
> You shoot yourself in the foot. The gun fires half an hour later (lazy
> evaluation), blows your hand instead of your foot (polymorphism), and 
> leaves you in a state of total amnesia (memory leaks).

Memory leaks are when you remember something far longer than you need
to and that's because you need to remember to load the gun before you
fire it, but you don't do that until immediately before you need to
shoot yourself in the foot, of course, that forces you to go to the
store and buy the bullets, and of course, then you find out that you are
out of vehicles as you've driven half-way to the grocer's but haven't
finished because you haven't been hungry yet, halfway to the hardware
shop for tools but nothing requires fixing yet, and halfway to the
post-office but you haven't written the letter yet.