From: "edx" <edwork@netvigator.com>
To: "Florian Cramer" <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>,
Subject: Another try at a Code Poem
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 15:42:23 -0400

OK, let's pick something simple (though that may be the problem) like Death,
like as in the death of someone else.

Now how would you code that? In CODE, death is a crash, and the first and
foremost thing code must not do is crash. So perhaps for this poem, maybe we
want the app the crash? Perhaps an obvious thing like an autobiography that
crashes the OS at age 76?

Or to be more general, what if we documented the app author's death? CODE
and temporal order, debugging a simple little script from the Beyond. No -
that won't do!

So what else can we do? What if we treat death like an error and trap for
it? That works for code but not biological organisms, which raises the
question - to what extent are WE still biological?

So what if we just stipulate that some entity is dying, without worrying
about it's metaphysical constitution. It could be a way of thinking or a
mass of protoplasm, what's the difference, ultimately? No matter how finely
your abstract this, this means people, cities, civilizations will die, but's
let's go ahead and see what happens.

By the dialectical principle, we know that death is absolution in birth, so
we now see why it is possible to debug, criticize, or even think in the
first place.

So the code might go like this:

[poem follows, I will send later, but here's an outline....]

Given(Death)

    for each (glimpse of life)

        SendToMemory(glimpse of life)

    next
End the Given


SendToMemory(a)
{
    //test here if the incoming data is worth remembering

    //test here if it has been heard before

    //continue testing, then if it passes

    //transform the incoming data

    //record the transformed data if it gets this far
}

Again, this is a shit poor example of a Code Poem, it won't compile or run,
and it certainly doesn't meet the criteria for a code poem I suggested
earlier.

Even the simplest code poem would compile on both a human and machine OS.