Jack and the Beanstack

This one's an old favorite. If you've ever killed time running fortune on a Unix shell, you just might have read this. I've pasted only a small extract here (with the author's permission) but you can read the whole piece on the author's site.

Jack and the Beanstack
by Mark Isaak

Once, 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 Forth. 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.
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