Ways to do it According to the Programming Languages of the World

• Perl - There’s more than one way to do it.
• C++ - There are 5 ways to do it, 3 out of which are not supposed to work.
• Visual Basic - The only way to do it is to use a third party component.
• ANSI C - There is usually one way to do it, but there’s more than one way to optimise it.
• Java - There’s barely one way to do it. (But as opposed to C++ it is guaranteed to work.)
• Python - There’s only one way to do it. The one true way of doing it. And then there are others.
• COBOL - The only way to do it is to use something else.
• Common LISP - There is a infinite series of ways to do it, increasing in elegance, and decreasing in legibility.
• Scheme - There are several ways to do it, but you have to chart all of them yourself.
• Haskell - You can think of any number of ways to do it, but only one will have a reasonable time or space complexity.
• Forth - There are several ways to write it, but no way to read it.
• HTML - There are many ways to do it. Most of them should be avoided at all costs, and the other ones should better be generated with something else.
• The C Preprocessor - There’s not supposed to be a way to do it.
• Fortran - there isn’t a way to do it... oh wait! Now there is.
• Bash - There are several ways to do it. Now one has to find a way to decide which way to do it.
• C Shell - The only way to do it does not work.
• zsh - There’s at least one way to do anything.

Copyright and Licence

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2002, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).

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