garey@ut-ngp.UUCP (riggs, austen) (03/31/85)
I ran across this in the April issue of Microcornucopeia: Confusing at Catastrophy Manor Alas, it has been yet another sleepless month here at Catastrophy Manor. My faithful Z80, Beulah, began spitting out 'not ready' errors two weeks ago and my in-house technician didn't discover until yesterday that I had not put a disk in the drive. During that time I was forced to use Zimblefield J. Rothschild, the Cray 1 that normally monitors the odor level from the kitty box. What a frustrating machine! I certainly wish someone would enlighten the Cray people on how to design a proper keyboard. The left shift key is positioned at least a sixteenth of an inch from the standard position on the Selectric! I call their customer service department to complain but it doesn't do any good. This is the fit}ih Cray they've given me, and they still haven't gotten the left shift right. WORTHLESS SOFTWARE Now that my latest novel, 'Stumblefeet' is completed, I have refocused my attention on eating, and insulting anyone who markets a product I have not already recommended in my column, along with those who program in anything other than Pascal or Modula-2. This month I received a program for the IBM-PC that guarentees to find enough tax loopholes to reduce your income tax to nothing. Every year. How ludricous. I have never seen that in my column. I even went back and looked (plus, I paid taxes last year, so I must not have reviewed it). To make things even more ridiculous, it is written in C. And they expect me to open the box? Come now fellows, how much effort do you expect me to make? HIGH TECHNOLOGY I have been saying for years that the only way for a computer company to be successful is to design a Timex-Sinclair compatible S-100 board. I must have said that to at least 50 people. Nobody listened. But finally, Say Co. Computers came out with exactly what I have been waiting for, and it is truly a tribute to high technology. It can add 200 numbers (some of them large) in under a second, it has a real time display, and it is water resistant. I am considering using one here at Catastrophy Manor to replace the Crays if something isn't done about that appalling keyboard. FREE POURSMELLE SOFTWARE A while back I was thunbing through the truckloads of mail, free copies of Burpo Pascal and free Honkubro hardware that all of us famous overweight computer columnists get, when I found a request for another incredible Modula-2 Star Trek game. Since I don't want to write another Star Trek game, and I don't reallu pay any attention to my mail anyway, I decided to write a Pascal to Lisp translator. I have been laboring over it for several months and it is finally done. I was planning on selling it for $99.95 through The Software Foolworks, but due to a momentary affliction of divine benevolence, I have decided to publish it here in the hallowed pages of OVERBYTE. This translator avoids all the usual problems of converting infix to prefix notation and of moving from the domain of a sequential language to that of a procedural language. In fact, my translator is very unusual because its output precisly mimics the original Pascal (The process is known as LISP Sync). My son Smartalex doesn't think that anyone WANTS to convert Pascal to Lisp (but then he thinks that the 68000 is more powerful than the 6502). By VERRY POURSMELLE (As compiled by Laine Stump)