Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Crowdsourced programming pun

[scottworley]

Sorry, I don't think this pun is going to work.

fork() is not an operation than one can perform on another process.
fork() operates on the current process.  I.e., theSystem can fork()
itself, but it doesn't make sense to talk about _doing_ fork() _to_
theSystem from outside.

Concretely: "fork()" is called just like that, with empty parenthesis.
It doesn't accept any parameters because it doesn't operate _on_
something else.

The closest thing one could do would be to declare that one is itself
called "theSystem", and then fork() (itself), which is probably not the
narrative you're looking for.  That, in C:

#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv) {

  strncpy(argv[0], "theSystem", strlen(argv[0]));
  fork();

}


Stick with forking revision control repositories.

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 02:30:16PM -0400, Zak Rogoff, Free Software Foundation 
wrote:
> Programming puns, every free software user's favorite thing that never
> gets old, right?
> 
> The FSF is prepping to launch a tshirt design for this year's
> LibrePlanet conference, and it's going to include the slogan "fork the
> system." We want the back of it to have a bunch of lines of code in
> different languages forking an imaginary process called theSystem or
> something like that.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't have enough programming knowledge to generate a
> lot of these and make sure that the syntax makes sense, so I was hoping
> to crowdsource that process.
> 
> Here are some to start. please let me know if you feel they don't make
> sense or could be improved, or if you've got any others:
> 
> C: newSystem = fork(theSystem);
> 
> Python: newSystem = os.fork(theSystem);
> 
> Haskell: newSystem <- forkProcess (theSysetm); (not at all confident in
> this one)
> 
> Perl: $newSystem = fork(theSystem);
> There's another angle we can take, which would be commands for version
> control systems to fork a repo, i.e.:
> 
> git clone theSystem newSystem
> 
> svn checkout theSystem newSystem
> 
> Ideas of this type are more than welcome as well. We'll use one type or
> both, depending on how many we get.
> 
> Other ways of representing the pun in code would also be great. Thank you!
> 
> -- 
> Zak Rogoff
> Campaigns Manager
> Free Software Foundation
> GnuPG key fingerprint: 6EB2 B137 347E 6F7C DEDC AFF6 82DE 8D64 B509 0AC8
> -- 
> Zak Rogoff
> Campaigns Manager
> Free Software Foundation
> GnuPG key fingerprint: 6EB2 B137 347E 6F7C DEDC AFF6 82DE 8D64 B509 0AC8
>