Which language am I using?

The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you're using.

This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

• Ada
  If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up on front of a firing squad, and thell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."
  
  
• Algol
  You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
  
  
• APL
  You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to undestand what the heck happened.
  
  
• Assembly
  You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.
  
  
• BASIC
  Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
  
  
• C
  You shoot yourself in the foot.
  
  
• C++
  You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."
  
  
• COBOL
  USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs to be retied.
  
  
• Dbase
  You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foots feels the pain you've forgotten why you shot yourself in the first place.
  
  
• Dbase IV ver 1.0
  You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed grenade and the whole building blows up.
  
  
• English
  You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.
  
  
• FORTRAN
  You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-processing ability.
  
  
• FORTH
  Foot in yourself shoot.
  
  
• Hypertalk
  Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left leg of you. Answer the result.
  
  
• LISP
  You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...
  
  
• Logo
  You tell a turtle to draw a picture of a foot and a gun, then shoot the turtle.
  
  
• Microsoft C++ w/Windows SDK
  You write about 100 lines of code to print "Hello, world!" in a dialogue box, only to have a UAE pop up when you click on OK. This shuts down the program manager, leaving you nothing but a screensaver. You then fly to Washington and shoot Bill Gates in the foot.
  
  
• Modula-2
  After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.
  
  
• Motif
  You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.
  
  
• Pascal
  Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the barrel. The gun explodes.
  
  
• PL/1
  You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing $ Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.
  
  
• Prolog
  You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in your face.
  
  
• sh,csh,etc
  You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.
  
  
• Scheme
  You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds... ...but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.
  
  
• Smalltalk
  You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.
  
  
• SNOBOL
  You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).
  
  
• UNIX
  % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o %rm *.o rm: O: No such file or directory % ls %
  
  
• Visual BASIC
  You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have so much fun doing it that you won't care.