[TUHS] Make love

[Mary Ann Horton]

Oh, I remember "Very funny!"  It was pr, V6, I think.

I wanted to format for a 132 wide printer and I mistakenly typed "pr 
-132 file" instead of "pr -w132 file".  It thought I wanted it formatted 
in 132 columns of text.

I about tore my hair out trying to figure out what "Very funny!" meant.

On 07/31/2015 07:42 PM, scj at yaccman.com wrote:
> Early Unix had a lot of cryptic messages -- the infamous "eh?", and "very
> funny!" were two that I got several times.  The make love message in the
> earliest make I remember was "Don't know how to make love."
>
> When working on PCC, I had the unenviable job of producing a C compiler
> that would accept all of  *077532 = 13, 077532->ack = 13, and device->ack
> = 13.  As we were trying to get the kernel and applications to declare
> addresses more "honestly", we adopted a rule that if you actually used a
> structure reference that was type safe, we would require it everywhere in
> the file.  Since structure members used to be in a single namespace, this
> led to some horribly complicated code.  In an effort to get it to work, I
> festooned it with consistency checks nearly every other line, getting more
> and more punchy as I tried to come up with short, unique messages.
>
> I'll never forget the look on Ken's face when he came to me and asked
> "what is a 'gummy structure'?"
>
> Nowadays, while I'm happy to have some fun with them, I think throwing
> humor at people who have just screwed up is playing to a tough audience.
> Today, I might have suggested that 'make love' produce something more like
> "Don't know how to make love.  Can you introduce me to a hot makefile?"
>
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