"Shooting Yourself in the Foot"
or
How to Determine Which Programming Language You're Using
(This list was provided by Katrin Kirchoff, a member of the Summer Workshop'97 Syllable Team.)

The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

C You shoot yourself in the foot. C++ You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "that's me, over there." Objective-C (NeXT) You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet. Ada If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet." or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type. Algol You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room. Pascal The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot. APL You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters. Assembly You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. BASIC Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged. Visual Basic You'll really only appear to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care. COBOL USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs to be retied. DBase You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot yourself anyway. DBase IV version 1.0 You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly-designed grenade and the whole building blows up. Forth yourself foot shoot. FORTRAN You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception- processing ability. Modula/2 After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head. sh, csh, etc. You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C. Smalltalk You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal. PL/I You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The DataProcessing&Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot. Prolog You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in your face. or You tell your program you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to explain. SNOBOL You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot). or If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot. Lisp You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds... Scheme You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening. Paradox Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too. Access You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution disks instead. Revelation You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for. English You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. CLIPPER You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot, and discover that the gun that the bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_. SQL You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg. 370 JCL You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried. Unix % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm: .o: No such file or directory % ls % Concurrent Euclid You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot. HyperTalk Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result. Motif You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams. Java You create a bullet applet and shoot over the net into Bill Gates foot. Synopsis You want to figure out how to shoot into your foot while you accidently drop the manual. It smashes your foot and crashes through the floor until it reaches the cellar.