Re: [TUHS] Make love

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?"