On hidden humour and a little known penguin

A good friend (Hi Tony) sent me this absolute gem of a thread started by one of his co-workers this morning.

Understanding the code (and I freely admit I didn't) is not necessary to appreciate the dry wit in the various replies.

But it was this particular reply that just about brought tears of laughter to my eyes.

For those that don't understand diff output or C code, the gist is that Rusty came up with this rather clever (ie horribly obscure. Read Linus' initial reply...) way of causing the code to fail loudly when used inappropriately. When tasked with the lack of obviousness, Rusty added a rather terse comment to his initial patch to clarify just what his patch does. Sorta.

Said comment being the text:

GCC is awesome.

Where GCC is the GNU C Compiler. The irony being that this comment is perfectly accurate and also totally useless in fixing the "lack of obviousness" problem.

I'm sniggering just re-reading all this.