Version 0 of The Garage with the Pipe Wrench

It occured to me as sort of a poetic/litarary though, that car shop with on a golden spike the Ultimate Tool: the silver coloured Pipe Wrench, those Ultimate Special Water Pump Pliers, good for any rambling job. If the shop would be in Poland, they'd want to have Mr. Gates to specially bless it at the opening ceremony, in Texas it might have a star sprinkled banner painted on it, in Italy it might have a specially slick design, and Holland, it might have a special tombstone made for it somewhere.

But anyhow, the garage owner and repairman would wrench everything back together with his silver pipe wrench day in day out and be known to all the locals as the king of the water pump pliers.

Until some day somebody came along showing pity on the man, and donated a socket wrenches, so that no more after a service at this garage all other garages would have to turn the car down because all its bolt and nut endings would be rotten...

Thinking about the (now at least working) page on constructing a bwise graph from a formula, I though about when I learned about such things, which was fasionable at the time at the network theory section (Delft University o t., EE), lets say about 1986, in time of the rise of the big minis, workstations, and networks. The unwritten rule at the time amoung students and PhD students was to first be expert enough on Unix and C before anything, and one would have to be not affraid of Lex/Yacc, large hierarchical databases and their interfacing, complicated simulation tools, etc.

To make a language, and not write for instance a syntax/grammar definition first would be equally condemnable as sinning against the rule of not making a correct nested flow (nasi/schneider) diagram of your algoritm(s) first. Mind you the latter is freshman informaticists stuff of course, the former hard core Electrical Engineering matter.

This morning I woke up thinking about what in holland was called the 'fabeltjeskrant' (the newpaper of fables) which was an incredibly popular program in the beginnings of the 70's [L1 ], where they had two beavers, Ed and Willem, who were mechanics.

A song was a big hit at the time 'Daar heb je Willem met the waterpomptang' ('there's willem with the water pump pliers') : [L2 ] .