[alephnil]

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.

[Crinus]

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 :-).

[mcguire]

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