JACK AND THE BEANSTACK
by Mark Isaak

Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL character named Jack. Jack and his relations were poor. Often their hash table was bare. One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices are sparse. You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some BASICs." She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it to him.

So Jack set out. But as he was walking along a Hamilton path, he met the traveling salesman.

"Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman in high-level language.

"I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips and Apples," commented Jack.

"I have a much better algorithm. You needn't join a queue there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now."

Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house. But when he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she started thrashing.

"Don't you even have any artificial intelligence? All these kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the window ...