Once upon a time in the distant past, people entered programs on punched cards. They read these in to the mainframe and came back a few hours later or even the

Once upon a time in the distant past, people entered programs on punched cards. They read these in to the mainframe and came back a few hours later or even the next day to see the results. Often there was no useful output, as a result of a simple syntax error. Students taking introductory Computer Science courses made a lot of simple syntax errors. Some people at Cornell University wanted to help students out. So they wrote CUPL.[1] Cornell University Programming Language. CUPL attempted to discern the programmers true intention when encountering a syntax error in PL/I. The error message was of the form: blah blah error STANDARD FIXUP TAKEN EXECUTION CONTINUING This was useful to people who actually wanted to learn PL/I, but for us early hackers it was more amusing to just feed in random data and see CUPL attempt to turn it into legal PL/I. Unfortunately it didn't usually do a very good job. Moral: Some ideas in CS have been around for many many decades. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University_Programming_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_University_Programming...