---------------- -*- mode: text; coding: utf-8; fill-column: 70 -*- -- -- -- -- Humor (sometimes unintended) on the Emacs developer's list -- -- -- -- The Free Software Foundation claims no copyright on this file, -- -- compiled from the public emacs-devel mailing list. -- -- -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: lost argument and doc string I remember when I lost an argument. Boy did that hurt! ;-). -- RMS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "'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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I remember these versions as yard-rocks (is that between inch-pebbles and mile-stones?). -- Kai Grossjohann ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [...] 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Re: patch for woman (woman-topic-at-point) "Sorry for the long message. I wanted to make the problem clear also for people not familiar with `woman'." "Most hackers, I take? For a moment there I thought you had a patch that you could put on a woman, and it would make her come right to the topic at point without attempting any course of action that requires an advance course in divination. There'd be quite a sensational market for that, you know." -- Emilio Lopes and David Kastrup ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[...] 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "[...] So please do not delete anything." "Done." -- RMS and David Kastrup