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by Crinus 2645 days ago
I think this is a reference to an old joke about "God is Real, unless declared as Integer" since in Pascal Real and Integer are data types.
1 comments
alephnil 2645 days ago
The joke is actually about FORTRAN, where variables don't have to be declared, and is implicitly declared as Integer if it's first letter is in the range I-N and otherwise implicitly declared as the type Real (usually 32-bit floating point). Thus the variable GOD will implicitly be of type real.

Pascal have the same type names, but does not allow implicit declarations.

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Crinus 2644 days ago
Oh, interesting. I suspected it might be from an older language, but i expected Algol, not FORTRAN :-P.

Personally i associate it with Pascal because i first saw it on an IRC channel's topic back in the mid-90s :-).

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mcguire 2644 days ago
If it's a stupid programming joke, you can probably blame it on FORTRAN. COBOL programmers don't have senses of humor.
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