Programming For Alternative Health Professionals

EoR has had undercover agents investigating the internal programming of the SCIO magic machine (yes, yes, EoR really promises to stop going on about this - soon - honest).

It appears the machine is programmed in an altie friendly language: Paranoid Programming Language or PPL. Where else would you find statements that so easily prove altie concepts such as past lives, prayer, chakras and homeopathy?

While PPL recognises the normal "\fC:=" method of assignment, this is recognised as being slightly conventional. The normal alternatives to this rather pedantic style of programming are:
      x !:= 3
which assigns any other value but 3 to x.
      x REALLY 3
which insists strongly that x is 3.
      x HONESTLY 3
which forces the system to believe that x is 3.
      x MIGHTBE 3
which just lets the system make its mind up, and most powerful of all,
      I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU SAY ABOUT x
which doesn't really give a damn.

The conditional statements are also ideal for providing data for your next scientific study proving homeopathy really works:

Well, this is the field in which PPL really scores over all other programming languages. Whereas other languages only offer a generalised IF-THEN-ELSE or a CASE statement, PPL has a whole class of utterly novel wish-fulfilment statements. For example...
      IF x WAS_EVER 100 THEN
         DON'T print(x)

      IF j IS_NEARLY right
         DELETE ALL INCORRECT
         REFERENCES TO j

      UNLESS a IS "My Name" THEN
         crash_unix

      WHENEVER errors THEN
         run_in_circles_scream_and_shout

      ON_SUSPICION_OF x < 100
         CORRECT ANY OTHER
         REFERENCES TO x

      IN_CASE y NEARLY x THEN y
REALLY x

There are further procedures that are regularly implemented by altie practitioners and psychics:

Naturally a language as rich as PPL offers a sophisticated range of reality-altering features. These are not defined by the normal PPL specification document but are left to the implementors. Typical pragmas include the following:
      #distrust(procedure)
to put extra suspicion on a procedure,
      #ignore(procedure)
to totally forget about any calls to a procedure,
      #blame(procedure)
to pin the blame on this procedure whenever something dies
      #hide(procedure)
to forget that a procedure ever existed.

While a full PC implementing PPL is yet to be created, it is comforting to the colonic cleansers to learn that one of the peripherals already working with the prototype is a rectal pattern-recogniser.

If programming in PPL sounds a little too complicated for the busy alternative health practitioner, EoR recommends the use of the NIL programming language instead. The results obtained will be exactly the same.

In spite of the sophisticated feature set, implementation of a compiler is almost trivial. Here, in short, the necessary steps for processing:

1. atomisation: split the source code into atoms - consider every word to be one atom.


2. translation: convert every atom into the corresponding machine code. Since Nil is a Nihilistic programming language, only the NOP operation opcode is allowed.


3. optimisation: using "peephole" optimisation techniques, you will see that multiple NOP opcodes can be replaced by a single one. Therefore, optimisation is extremely efficient.