emacs/etc/DEVEL.HUMOR

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-- Humor (sometimes unintended) on the Emacs developer's list       --
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-- The Free Software Foundation claims no copyright on this file,   --
-- compiled from the public emacs-devel mailing list.               --
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  "Is it legal for a 'struct interval' to have a total_length field of
zero?"
  "We can't be arrested for it as far as I know, but it is definitely
invalid for an interval to have zero length."
                                                -- Miles Bader and RMS

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Re: lost argument and doc string

I remember when I lost an argument.  Boy did that hurt!  ;-).
                                                      -- RMS

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  "'Cowardly' is not an adverb, although it looks like one.  It is an
adjective.  It makes a statement about general temperament, rather
than a specific occasion.  I don't think Emacs has a general
temperament."
  "Mine does."
                                             -- RMS and Eli Zaretskii

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  "In order to bring the user's attention to the minibuffer when an
item such as 'Edit -> Search' is activated from the menu, I was just
thinking that we could draw a big rectangle around the minibuffer,
blinking (or zooming in-and-out) until some input is typed in."
  "How about dancing elephants?"
  "They don't fit in my office."
  "Well once the elephants are done, your office will be much...
bigger."
                  -- Stefan Monnier, Miles Bader and Kai Grossjohann

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I remember these versions as yard-rocks (is that between inch-pebbles
and mile-stones?).
                                                   -- Kai Grossjohann

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  "I think it depends on video drivers.  I cannot reproduce it on my
home PC, but I can at work."
  "Can you try to find a workaround at work?  (I guess you don't need
a homearound at home.  ;-)"
                                              -- Jason Rumney and RMS

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By the way, I also really really hate this unibyte/multibyte problem.
Sometimes I think I should have opposed to the introduction of such a
concept more strongly.

    imagine there's no unibyte
    it's easy if you try
    no bytes below us
    above us only chars
    imagine all the people living in multibyte

                                                     -- Kenichi Handa

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I try to uphold the ideals that I was taught to value as an American,
but every year I get less and less help from the United States.
                                                              -- RMS

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  "If the terminfo entry is most likely wrong, and we know it, then it
doesn't make sense to follow it."
  "Nevertheless, until now, we always did."
  "So.... should we not fix old bugs?"
  "Why fix an old bug if you can write three new ones in the same
time?"
                       -- Miles Bader, Eli Zaretskii and David Kastrup

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  [...] As is well known, people who speak American English tend to
be more resource-conscious and try to avoid wasting precious bits
transferring those redundant "u"s.
  Think of the number of occurrences of "color" and "behavior" in the
Emacs tarball, multiply that by the number of times it'll be
downloaded, stored on hard disks, archived, ...that's a substantial
saving.
                                                    -- Stefan Monnier

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Re: Parent of a derived mode's keymap.

  "I can't decide whether the title of this thread is more fitting for
a blues song or a pulp fiction booklet.  It certainly projects drama."
  "Hey, it says derived, not deprived."
  "Actually, for some keymaps 'depraved' would fit better."
  "I knew it!  You're one of them vi lovers!  There is nothing wrong
with Emacs using escape, meta, alt, control, and shift!"
                                     -- David Kastrup and Lute Kamstra

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  "Aren't user-defined constants useful in other languages?"
  "The only user-defined constant is ignorance.  (With programmers,
this is a variable concept ;-)"
                        -- Juanma Barranquero and Thien-Thi Nguyen

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  "Uh, 'archaic' and 'alive' is not a contradiction."
  "Yes it is.  'Archaic' does not mean 'old' or 'early'.  It means
'obsolete'."
  "'He arche' in Greek means 'the beginning'.  John 1 starts off with
'En arche en ho Logos': in the beginning, there was the word.  Now of
course we all know that Emacs was there before Word, but this might
have escaped John's notice."
                                             -- David Kastrup and RMS

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  "[T]here may be a good reason since the code explicitly checks for
this; see keyboard.c:789 [...]"
  "I think I understand, but I can't find the code in keyboard.c.  Do
you really mean 'line 789'?  Of which revision?"
  "Sorry; by 789, I mean 3262 :-P"
                                   -- Chong Yidong and Stefan Monnier

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  "[...] In my opinion, your change does not either increase or
decrease readability.  It's a tossup."
  "Uh, setting tem to '', an artificial empty string, in order to have
j incremented once again before breaking out of the finished loop is
readable?
   Is this kind of 'readable' synonymous to 'comprehensible with
serious effort', reminiscent of mathematicians' use of 'trivial' as
synonymous with 'provable with serious effort'?"
                                              -- RMS and David Kastrup

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Re: New Emacs Icon and Tango

  "What about using the 'happy face' with gnu horns?"
  "It would make Emacs the object of ridicule until the end of time."
  "Isn't it already?"
  "It's the object of ridicule until the end of _tape_.  The jury is
still out about that end of time thing."
                 -- Kim F. Storm, Miles Bader, RMS and David Kastrup

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  "Despite being a maths graduate, I can't think of any other such
constants with anything like the universality of e and pi."
  "42"
                                -- Alan Mackenzie and David Hansen

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  "[...] So please do not delete anything."
  "Done."
                                              -- RMS and David Kastrup

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  "I guess that can work in some circumstances, but it bypasses the
printer drivers.  Couldn't that lead to problems for the printer
drivers?"
  "Current research is that software does not suffer feelings of
depression or loneliness when it is left out of the picture, so I
wouldn't worry about it too much."
                                -- Lennart Borgman and Jason Rumney

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  "... a non-CS-educated guy like me ..."

  "Kind of late, but thanks for letting us know.  I've just revoked your
  write access to the repository for the obvious safety reasons,"
                                -- Bastien Guerry and Stefan Monnier

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  "I should have known better than to think I could be right and you
wrong about some Emacs code I've just started looking at.  Sorry about
that."

  "No problem.  It's one of the many joys of working on a code base
that's up to almost 40 years old: First you have to figure out what
the (no doubt smart) programmer meant to achieve with the code, and
then try to figure out whether it ever even did that, and then whether
it's still working the same way, and then whether it's still relevant
due to changes elsewhere, and then finally whether it can be improved
without breaking odd edge cases on obscure systems you don't have
access to.  🙃"
                                -- Ignacio Casso and Lars Ingebrigtsen