Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982)

Re:Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982) by yonder on Thursday March 28, 2019 @03:34AM (#19510089)

Integers are real numbers. Perhaps they are arguing with imaginary programmers.

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Re:Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982) by Crinus on Thursday March 28, 2019 @07:45AM (#19511208)

I think this is a reference to an old joke about "God is Real, unless declared as Integer" since in Pascal Real and Integer are data types.

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Re:Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982) by alephnil on Thursday March 28, 2019 @08:25AM (#19511462)

The joke is actually about FORTRAN, where variables don't have to be declared, and is implicitly declared as Integer if it's first letter is in the range I-N and otherwise implicitly declared as the type Real (usually 32-bit floating point). Thus the variable GOD will implicitly be of type real.

Pascal have the same type names, but does not allow implicit declarations.

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Re:Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982) by Crinus on Thursday March 28, 2019 @12:42PM (#19513916)

Oh, interesting. I suspected it might be from an older language, but i expected Algol, not FORTRAN :-P.

Personally i associate it with Pascal because i first saw it on an IRC channel's topic back in the mid-90s :-).

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Re:Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal (1982) by mcguire on Thursday March 28, 2019 @02:53PM (#19515315)

If it's a stupid programming joke, you can probably blame it on FORTRAN. COBOL programmers don't have senses of humor.

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