I forget the exact product in question, but I recall a mention in one if
Djikstra's books of a cryptic assembler program that was completely
devoid of comments except for one octal constant which had the comment
"RIP LVB".  After much research and guesswork, the decimal value of the
constant was discovered to be the year of Beethoven's death :-)

I had a college professor, Rex Jones (now deceased), who was a very
humorous guy.  In a systems analysis class, he gave a COBOL example:

   IF MEETING-WAS-MISSED THEN PERFORM EXTREME-ANNOYANCE-OF-SECRETARY
       THROUGH VERBAL-ABUSE-AND-HARASSMENT VARYING TONE-OF-VOICE
       FROM SOMEWHAT-ANNOYED TO EXTREMELY-AGITATED BY SUBTLE-INFLECTION

(or something like that) (not that it was politically correct :-) )

The key point was that that a language in and of itself is not always
inherently cryptic, but rather the programmer's choice of names of
variables, functions, etc.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>