[0136] (48 lines) Lippard.Multics 01/30/87  1432.2 mst Fri misc
Subject:  New programming languages
PYNCHON -- A language designed by the Illuminati Corporation for
simulation of social and political interrelationships, particularly
those involving competition or aggression.  Its main design principle
is operational paranoia.  Within a program, for example, the usual
scope rules are reversed, so that lower routines have absolutely no
access to variables at higher levels, except through auxiliary request
routines called "receptionists" which may or may not deliver the required
value at some time later on in the program.  But PYNCHON's main innovation
is in the interaction between processes, or lack thereof.  The concept  
of uncooperating processes avoids synchronization problems.  There is no 
need for shared memory, since processes do not trust each other enough;
information is transferred by a mutual suspicion mechanism.  Unfortunately, no 
performance evaluations exist, because the compiler is being made available
only in encrypted binary.

Rumour has it that some faculty members at certain European universities
feel that the idea of PYNCHON is a good one, but that the very presence of
a variable, whose value might be changed when one is not looking,
leads to insecurity.  They are working on a theory of functional paranoia,
from which it is hoped that the obscurity of programs will increase to
such a level that clear text source code can be made public without giving
away any indication of what the program actually does.  This rumour, alas,
cannot be substantiated, as no one's talking to anyone else.

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SARTRE -- Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an
extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose;
they just are.  Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own
functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed and are
no fun at parties. The SARTRE language has two basic data types, the
EN-SOI and the  POUR-SOI. The EN-SOI is a completely filled heap,
where as the POUR-SOI is a dynamic structure which never has the same
value. The structures are accessed through the the only operation
defined in SARTRE, nihilation, which usually results in a 
?BAD FAITH at PC 02AC040 error. Comparisons in SARTRE have a peculiar
form in that the IF statement can take no arguments and simply reads

                IF;

Similarly, assignments can only be of the form

         WHAT-IS := (NOT WHAT-IS);

since in SARTRE the POUR-SOI is only, and exactly, what it is not.
Although this sounds confusing, a backround process, the NIHILATOR, is
constantly running, making any such statements (or any statements at
all, for that matter), completely meaningless.
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