Some students in
MIT's
6.001 did a
Scheme spellbook one year as a
hack. It was
hand-written in
Postscript. The front and back
had a recursive picture with a
shield, a
lambda, and the text
`(Y F) = (F (Y F))' (the defining property of
fixed-point combinators, of which the
Y combinator is the most well-known). The text of the
spellbook is:
Cause Light Wounds
I call upon chaos to cause unbalanced parentheses.
Darkness
I summon the darkness of night to hide all free machines.
Cause Wounds
I call upon the forces of chaos to crash your server.
Call Undead
I call all environment pointers to this very spot.
Lie
I call upon chaos to make your debugger lie.
Cause Serious Wounds
I call upon the powers of chaos to cause recursive bugs.
Control Undead
By death's dark mantle and the powers of chaos, I control environment pointers to do my bid.
Unbind
By the powers of chaos, I unbind all variables.
Poison
I call upon chaos, decay, and rot to panic your process.
Cause Critical Wounds
I call upon chaos itself to cause fatal errors.
Create Undead
By the powers of chaos, I create environment pointers.
Wither
I call upon the powers of darkness to wither your abstractions.
Curse
I curse your code to forever underflow the stack.
Obfuscate
I call upon chaos to obfuscate your abstractions.
Waste
By the powers of darkness, I command you to waste your time optimizing useless abstractions.
Quest
By the powers of chaos, I quest you on this problem set.
Death
I grant you the gift of repeating 6.001.
The copyright notice is as follows:
%Copyright 1992 Dave Cho All Rights Reserved
%Permission is given to freely distribute and modify this product so long
%as it is done without charge and so long as this Copyright text remains in
%place.
%Certain designs inherent may be copyrighted elsewhere.
%Dave Cho 1992