Raptus Regaliter

(Via Justin Otto\'s blog)

So you buy your wife a taser gun, to show your deep and abiding love for her.  How are you going to check it works?  Not this way, if you have any sense.

My God, I just got solicited for a CUTLASS job!!

Cutlass was a development of the UK Central Electricity Generating board, and was used to write control systems for power stations.  I don\'t know what it\'s like now (it seems to have gotten a lot prettier since I last saw it) but at the time I had to deal with it (1991), it ran on DEC PDP11s using RSX, and was very FORTRAN-like.  As the site said, it was good at tracking bad data.  All variables could represent what was called a \"DBI\" (don\'t believe it) state.  This was usually for something that was in transition, like a large valve (If you\'re wondering why, then you need to see the average size of a valve in a power station.  You could probably fit your house in one of those).

This lead to the only tri-state booleans I have ever seen, or I ever want to see, for that matter, as debugging the stuff was a nightmare. 

I think I\'ll stick with PHP, thank you very much.