A C programmer finds a genie lamp.

Posted by CynicalCosmologist@reddit | Jokes | View on Reddit | 16 comments

He rubs it, the genie comes out, and says, "you know the drill. Three wishes."

The programmer says, "make it 0."

The genie says, "OK, you now have 2³²-1 wishes."

[-]

LoftyQPR@reddit

For those who don't get it (because it is pretty obscure):

His first wish is to have 0 wishes instead of 3 wishes. When the genie then reduces his number of wishes remaining by one, we get 0 minus 1. Assuming a 32 bit register, a decrement register instruction would change the value from all 0s to all 1s: which represents "2^32 - 1". I guess the joke is in the sighn (misspelling intentional).

[-]

speculatrix@reddit

You young'uns with your 32 bit registers. Back in my day we had 8 bits, and were glad for every bit!

[-]

InitHello@reddit

Luxury. Back in my day we owed the stack 4 bits.

[-]

Gandgareth@reddit

O' course, when i say 8 bit register, it was really just a few gold traces covered with a sheet of ceramic insulator.

[-]

EeeGee@reddit

You 'ad gold? Cor, to be so lucky! When I were a lad we 'ad nowt but a bit of tinfoil out of a cig packet and we 'ad to beg for brick scraps off t'builders to use as insulators!

[-]

RecalcitrantHuman@reddit

You were lucky.

[-]

ondulation@reddit

You posh people! When I grew up we had to manually move rocks in the CPU and they were covered in slime.

[-]

Stekor-Tidder@reddit

Rocks and slime! Oh, we used to dream of rocks and slime. The best we could manage to get was mud -- and we had to push it around with shovels made from rolled-up newspapers.

[-]

Recent_Practice6539@reddit

serious question, shouldn’t it be 233 -1 ?

[-]

mkawick@reddit

I could see an argument for 255 or possibly 65535

233-1? No idea

[-]