[2345] in Humor
Steve Weiss: HUMOR: Recurses, Reviled Again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Wed Jun 17 14:41:40 1998
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 14:34:32 EDT
------- Forwarded Message
From: Steve Weiss <SteveWeiss@comshare.com>
Forwarded from Ann Arborite Joe McConnell's W-C News Service
Joe says to feel free to forward this as long as it's not for profit.
- -srw
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RECURSES, REVILED AGAIN
Ann Arbor: There is some danger, meta-software cosmologists warn,
that the universal all may be entering an unstable phase and beginning
to exhibit some of the symptoms commonly seen in overloaded or
poorly-thought-out computer systems. For example, recursion, the
mathematical and programming term for the process of functions
calling themselves, seems to be rearing its head in areas of daily life
that are not specifically software-related.
For example, the White House is calling, apparently without more than
the usual lingual length in cheek, for an independent prosecutor to
investigate the behavior of the independent prosecutor who's
investigating them. You could argue (and you probably will) that this
is not a recursive call but just an example of instantiation, where the
constructor, independent_prosecutor (target, agenda), is being called to
create another instance of the independent_prosecutor object.
However, I could argue (and I think I will, right now, in fact) that the
situation is less clear-cut than that, since the instantiating object
(the White House) is only enabled to issue the call after a triggering
action by an existing instance of the class being instantiated, namely
the issuance of a ludicrous_gaffe message. Metaphysically, then, we
could see Kenneth Starr as having called himself by providing another
object with the enabling condition it requires to sic Janet Reno on his
mangy ass.
Now, the definition of "recursion" offered by the Free On-line
Dictionary of Computing (http://wfn-shop.Princeton.EDU/foldoc/)
includes the following important note:
"If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it
will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on
its arguments to check for a "base case" - a condition under which it
can return a value without calling itself."
In other words, the implementer of a recursive function has the
responsibility to provide a guard or short stop, preventing runaway
processing. However, since the independent_prosecutor object was
almost certainly (oh, ok, certainly) not designed using sound
computational principles or in an ISO 9001-certified environment, the
probability of there being no such guard in place approaches (oh, ok,
is)
1. So, from this, we can postulate the frightening vision of 100% of
the intelligent life in the universe being named independent prosecutors
within a period of time that can be (but hasn't been) easily calculated.
At the first point at which an object attempts to execute an
independent_prosecutor constructor and receives a NULL return,
indicating that no more sentient beings are available to fill the
office, there had damn well better be somebody checking the return
values, or the universe will seg fault.
- --
Meanwhile, in yet another example of recursive corporate behavior,
Reuters reports that Al Dunlop, the so-called "chainsaw" of corporate
downsizing, has himself been downsized by his latest victim -- that is,
employer -- Sunbeam Corporation. It is not the case, yet, that Sunbeam
had to bring in a downsizing expert in order to rid itself of an
incompetent, inefficient executive workforce, but that situation is
certainly not impossible to imagine (at least, not for me, it isn't, but
then I enjoy imagining things like that). Since companies bring in
Huns like Dunlop to improve short-term performance, and since these
people carry a substantial price tag themselves, it's only a short step
toward hiring another CEO whose specialty is cutting out the cutters-
out (since after you improve earnings per share in year 1 by reducing
labor, closing plants, and generally gutting a corporation, there isn't
much left to cut in year 2 -- except the high priced axemen and
axewomen left over from the previous year.)
Fortunately, this form of recursion does have its own, fundamental
guard in that the corporation in question represents the scope of the
operations. When the last employee (presumably the last CEO hired)
lays himself off, the last pointer is freed, and the system executes a
graceful shutdown.
- --
The Wood-Charles News Service and Computer Science Rant has been
brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern, now pioneering the
hospitality industry's first recursive last call. "Oh, call yourself,"
suggested a member of wait staff.
- - 30 -
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