A.P. Lawrence

 CartoonsChoices : This one reminds me of a classic

Commodore computer gag from many years ago. Jim Butterfield,

THE authority on 8 bit Commodore hardware, was making

a presentation at a computer show. He wrote the following

program in CBM (Microsoft) BASIC on a C-64: 100 CBM=1

200 IF CBM THEN PRINT "GOOD CHOICE!" 300 IF TANDY THEN

PRINT "WE'RE BETTER!" Both CBM and TANDY seemed to be

perfectly logical names for floating point variables,

even though Commodore BASIC only recognized the first

and second characters of the variable names as significant.

Anyhow, Jim ran the program and it executed lines 100

and 200 okay but stopped with a syntax error on line

300 due to the seemingly okay expression IF TANDY. Tandy,

as I'm sure most readers would recall, were selling

their TRS-80's in direct competition with Commodore

and there was a fierce rivalry. Well, the audience,

most of whom were non-programmers, cracked up over the

error, thinking that the C-64 had it in for Tandy. What

they didn't realize was that TANDY actually contained

two BASIC keywords: TAN (extract the tangent of an angle

in radians) and AND (logical and). The interpreter,

reading from left to right, tokenized TAN, which requires

a parenthetical argument (the angle). After tokenizing

TAN, all that was left was DY and the resulting structure

made no sense. Ergo the error! 
BigDumbDinosaur