The opening comment gives a summary of known ports of Paranoia, as well as a drop box for questions or suggestions for the code.
Within a few years of the appearance of classic ParaBas, Brian Wichmann of the National Physical Laboratory in the U.K. inspired a flurry of ports when he translated Paranoia from Basic to Pascal. His ParaPas adheres closely to the structure of the Basic. Wichmann's intent was to test a new Pascal compiler at NPL.
The Pascal led naturally to a version in C by Thos Sumner
at the Data Center
of the University of California at San Francisco.
David M. Gay of Bell Labs also contributed to the port.
Some companies adapted
ParaC
to run without user interaction as a
smoke test of systems in development.
During the course of such usage at Sun Microsystems,
David G. Hough made a number of minor fixes
to ParaC.
The hasty flag in
ParaPy
offers similar nonstop execution:
"Just the facts, ma'am."
#
# William Kahan's Floating Point Test "Paranoia" recast in Python
#
# Jerome Coonen, v. 0.8 2020
#
# For an extended discussion of this program, please visit
# the Paranoia Study at www.arithmazium.org.
#
# Versions of Paranoia can be found on www.netlib.org:
# BASIC -- original source by William Kahan, 1982
# Pascal -- first translation, by Brian A. Wichmann, with
# David M. Gay and David G. Hough, 1986
# C -- adapted from Pascal by Thos Sumner, with
# David M. Gay, 1986
# Modula-2 -- adapted from Pascal by K. Y. Tan, 1986
# FORTRAN - single and double precision versions, 1986
# Forth -- adapted from C by Krishna Myneni, 2009
#
# BASIC version (C) 1983 by:
# Professor William M. Kahan,
# EECS Dept., Soda Hall, Room 441
# University of California
# Berkeley, California 94720 USA
#
# You may copy this program freely if you acknowledge its source.
# Please send comments on the Python version to
# Jerome Coonen at jcoonen@gmail.com
#
If you explore the other versions, you'll find
error messages of the form
Notify Karpinski!
The late Richard Karpinski was a colleague of
Sumner at the UCSF Data Center, and an active
contributor to multiple IEEE standards efforts.
You are invited to send any such comments to
me at the address in the code comment.