JOYFU when sounded out means “Joyful, with no L” or as it is really supposed to be sounded out “Joyfull Noel.” The lack of an L turns one word into two.
This is sort of an interesting introduction to missing letters or constructs. I happen to read a DoD journal called “CrossTalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering.” Most of the journal is either on Ada or above my head. The best part of the journal is the “Curmudgeon’s Corner.” It’s a sort of rambling article, written by Robert Bliss, talking about software topics.
In this last issue, Robert talks about missing letters. Robert writes:
“The intentional omission of words was the motivation behind Georges Perec’s 1969 novel ‘La Disparition.’ The author created a lipogram, a work in which something is prohibited, in this case any word containing the letter E. Perec wrote the work in French, which uses E for almost everything. When he completed ‘La Disparition’, Georges Perec realized he now had an abundance of unused words containing the the E left over. So he wrote his next work, ‘Les Revenentes’, with E as the only vowel used. (Do you ever get the feeling that some people have far too much time on their hands?)”
Robert then ponders how interesting it would be to write software where a contruct is prohibited. I know that the GOTO command has suffered this prohibition in the past with a number of very well known articles. But, would it be possible to write something with out a FOR loop, or a WHILE statement. I doubt that you could write something without a IF statement, but it might be possible.
An interesting demonstration of this would be a few code segments that would demonstrate how one would build a replacement for any particular construct. How you would write a FOR loop with a WHILE statement, how you would write a WHILE statement with a FOR statement, etc. I remember back in Computer Architectures class we were told that an entire computer could be constructed of only NOR gates. They showed how every other gate (OR, AND, XOR, NOT, etc) could be constructed with a number of NOR gates (I think it was the NOR gate).
I’m hoping someone will take this challenge and produce a some code. It’s the little puzzles like this that make programming fun.