How to find a needle in a haystack... In the spirit of "Driving To The Shop": Macintosh: You click on "Find", then type in "needle". The Mac then takes so long to pull the haystack apart that you forget what you wanted the needle for. UN*X: You spend half an hour trying to figure out how to do it. In desperation, you post to a newsgroup for help. The day afterwards, someone mails you a two-line shell script which burns the haystack, finds the needle with a magnet and then rebuilds the haystack from its ashes. Windoze: You click on "Find" then type in "needle". It only takes 3 minutes to find the haystack if you've got more the 8Mb, but the magnet provided is too weak to find the needle. Risc-OS: You select the "Find" option from the pop-up menu and then type in "needle". Half the time it finds the needle in less than a quarter of a second, but the other half it crashes and says "Find has suffered a fatal internal error (type=5) and must exit immediately". Prolog: You ask it to find the needle, and it figures out for itself that it needs to burn the haystack. Unfortunately the magnet runs out of stack space. Postscript: You describe the exact curvature of each bit of straw to the interpreter which then looks for the needle and attempts to return it only to find it is a level 1 interpreter and has no such facilities and bombs out reporting.. "Error: /undefined in needle: %interp_exit --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- Current file position is 22" Forth: You attempt to run your carefully designed Forth program to find the needle and it replies with "Stack Underflow." Upon checking you find that of course the needle has accidentally been popped off at the end of the last straw sorting routine and has now been added back to the haystack. MS-DOS: Halfway through the haystack it finds a nail. It interprets this as an "end-of-haystack" indicator and refuses to search any further. C: Accidentally trashes a pointer and burns down the three nearby cities instead. Those involved: Keith Lucas (sillywiz@dcs.warwick.ac.uk) Gothick (gothick@dcs.warwick.ac.uk) Charlie Gibbs (Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.bc.ca) Chris Reuter (cgreuter@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca)