Sunday, 11 April 2010

A curious thing about Fran: She used to have a proper job. She worked for a software company. By her own admission, it takes no ordinary personality defect to be "let go" in IT, but apparently Fran had the chops to achieve it.

Perhaps she saw the doubt in my face when she suggested she'd once been in a profession. She told me what she said was an old programming joke, to prove it. See what you make of it.

Three pointers are in a bar. Two of them are introducing themselves to each other, but the third is standing on his own with a face like thunder and a mad look about him. The first pointer says to the second, so, er, what kind of pointer are you? I know, he says, it's such a boring question... The second pointer says humbly that he is just a pointer to a char. In return, he asks the first pointer what he points to. The first pointer answers proudly that he is a pointer to an unsigned long. Nice, says the second. They stare at their feet for a moment, unsure how to continue the conversation. So, says the first, what about him over there? He nods towards the third pointer, now having an argument with the barman. Oh, says the second, he's a pointer to avoid.

I'm not accustomed to being the literal minded one in any discussion, but I am at her mercy. 'What kind of pointer are you then?' I ask her.

'I'm a pointer to avoid,' she says, with pride.

'What is a pointer?' I say.

'A pointer knows where something is. It's like the piece of paper an address is written on. The paper tells you where to go for what you want.'

'And a pointer to avoid is?'

'A pointer to a void is a like a piece of information you don't necessarily know the nature of. Imagine if you wrote down someone's phone number, but afterwards you weren't sure whether it was actually just a sequence of lottery numbers instead. A void is an unknown, basically.'

'Oh I see. So you mean you point to voids. Some kind of wordplay thing is going down, then.'

'Yes.'

'I see.'

Clever Fran.