Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!deimos!uxc!tank!mimsy!chris From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: GROK THIS!! Keywords: grok Message-ID: <14804@mimsy.UUCP> Date: 2 Dec 88 12:54:18 GMT References: <1289@leah.Albany.Edu> <3454@ttidca.TTI.COM> <767@quintus.UUCP> <1803@scolex> Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 31 >In article <767@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >>To quote the book "'grok' means 'drink'". (Hence "absorb completely".) Actually, the `absorb completely' explanation is a bit off. According to hints carefully never quite stated in the story, water has almost a religious significance to the Martians. The two meanings of `grok' (understand/drink) amount to the connotational and denotational differences to (e.g.) the English word `love' or `sex'. >>In fact the word PREDATES Heinlein's book. I forget the author & title .... In article <1803@scolex> brianm@sco.COM (Brian Moffet) writes: >The book was "Red Planet" by Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein was >very careful to keep his planet cultures the same through all of his >books. Any way, this topiuc doesn't really belong in this group >anymore. I had only read Red Planet at most three times, but this did not agree with what I remembered, so I reread it last night. While the sharing of the water of life and the (related) growing-together do occur in the book, nowhere does it use the word `grok'. The only Martian words that appear are proper names (Gekko, K'boomch). Just to `legitimise' this message: the C `grok' flag, of course, uses the denotational meaning and causes the computer to drink the source, whereupon it disappears completely. (The flag is supplied with DWIM mode on Lisp machines. They figure you should not be feeding C code in in the first place.) :-) -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163) Domain: chris@mimsy.umd.edu Path: uunet!mimsy!chris