logoalt Hacker News

vijucat • yesterday at 12:55 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

During my M.Tech in Comp. Sci, I was requested to volunteer to be a lab assistant in a diploma course in programming in C for non-technical people. A Ph.D. in Philosophy was complaining that his program was not compiling. He wrote "exist(0)" instead of "exit(0)". I found this so interesting. Existentialism was on his mind, I guess. The program clearly exits by not existing any more? Can't argue with that!

I corrected him and went on my rounds. I remember that a bank manager was the best of the batch. By the time I circled back to my philosophy friend, he quietly changed "exit()" back to "exist()" and the program was not compiling again! This anecdote stayed in my mind.


Replies

ryandrake • yesterday at 1:55 PM

Not gonna lie, exist(0) sounds badass and ought to be a system API of some kind.

➕ show 2 replies