The Eternal If-Then Statement

Posted by Jesus on March 28, 2008

Larry the Free Software Guy recently asked me why I don’t write as many entries on geek topics, which is interesting because he doesn’t believe in me. Today I’m going to answer him by educating my masses in the proper use of an if-then statement, while also hopefully convincing our heathen friend Larry to park his butt on a pew this weekend. Even lost souls still have their prayers delivered to Heaven, whether they believe or not. We typically don’t even see these prayers anymore, at least since Simon and I updated our prayer filter to use Bayesian logic. Somehow Larry’s prayer slipped through, and I’ve got to believe it’s providence. I’d ask Dad directly, but He’s on retreat with a pack of orangutans. Sometimes you gotta go with your gut anyway. Here’s how to write killer if-then statements.

The basic function of an if-then statement is to perform a specific task based on the condition of some criteria. For instance:

• If you sin, then you will burn in Hell
• If you renounce God, then you will be forsaken
• If you have an abortion, then you will get breast cancer
• If you vote for a Democrat, then God will let muslims kill you.

Note that all of the results require conditions being satisfied. We therefore assume that you will not go to Hell if you do not sin, will not be forsaken if you do not renounce God, and will avoid future 9/11-style attacks as long as you vote Republican. This is why the if-then statement is so powerful. It allows you to specify as narrow a selection as is necessary and assign some action to those items meeting your criteria. When you’re dealing with as many souls as I am on a daily basis, any little thing which might improve productivity is good.

So how does Jesus use the if-then statement? Probably the most critical script I run in the course of the day is the one which takes the list of all of the people who have died that day and scribes their permanent, eternal fate to the last page in their Book of Life. Normally this would require me to sit and sift through each individual’s Book to make a determination as to their fate, but after so many years in this job I’ve learned to shorten the process. Also remember that I’m usually the one actually writing your sins into your personal Book anyway, so I’ve got a leg up in matching criteria, which is the first step of our if-then statement!

So let’s say you’ve sinned pretty grievously in your life; some of the things you’ve done were even nasty enough to have landed you in my inbox once or twice. Having already run you through my for loop and thus assigned appropriate punishments, I have no need to go read your file again. I’ll just send a script out to read your Book and look for some of my phrases which, if found, will go ahead and put you in the bubbling vat of lizard puke you deserve without wasting St. Peter’s valuable time.

Of course this is not the entire script, or really taken verbatim from the actual script. There are bits here and there which account for those who have won Jesus Jackpots or have otherwise earned their entrance in to Heaven through divine favor, a well as an entire section which adds up the salvation points earned by the deceased and attempts to auto-determine their punishment in the real script. I still occasionally have to personally read someone’s Book, but afterwards I update my script to make it a little more capable the next time around. I’d let you see all of it, but since it’s over nine hundred and sixteen trillion lines long you’ll just have to make do with our little example today. That’s also why I haven’t bothered to convert it to perl or python as of yet. How would you feel if someone dropped a 2.5 billion hour project like that on your lap?

Let’s go over it to see how the if-then statement in this bit of scripting works. The first line of this snippet reads the file “death_list.txt” and picks out the names of the recently deceased one at a time. Their names are assigned to the variable SINNER, and the while loop (which we’ve covered before) kicks in with the simple command “do.” The script then searches for the words “damnable offense -jc” in the Book of Life belonging to the SINNER. The reason this text is searched is because it will only be present if they have been processed and damned by one of my other scripts sometime in the past. If the search finds these words it writes an entry into a file called SINNER.d.out.

The if-then statement is then called, and in this case it performs a super simple task. The condition “-f” checks for the existence of the file damned.SINNER.out, and if the file exists performs the next two tasks. First it directs output to my shell to inform me that the SINNER has been damned, and secondly it actually damns the individual by calling a binary Moses threw together for me. Any if-then statement must begin with if and end with fi. If the file isn’t found, then the SINNER won’t have to worry about Hell, at least until the next for loop.

Now before all of you Linux geeks get on your collective high horse and start to point out that I’m not cleaning up my output or adhering to your personal concept of good scripting standards, remember that this is but a small potion of a far more complex script and is really more of a presentable example than an actual direct reference to the script which determines your eventual eternal fate. And don’t pray to me about not covering else, elif, or any other portion of the if-then statement world. Remember that Heaven has a gargantuan budget, and I need to ensure a steady stream of future income by reserving further explanation for later posts. I assume that you’ve clicked some ads or bought a shirt this time around, so it’s reasonable to expect that you will do so again when I cover the rest of today’s topic. Dig deep.

And for all of you Christians who are undoubtedly going to get on my case for entrusting your very eternity to a script processing on a “soulless” computer, I’ll ask to you remember that I’m running Linux. That makes everything okay.

Speaking of which, how is everyone else doing with the Hardy Beta?

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