Stir-fry

Sorry about more geek humor, but this made me laugh.

Today I was on an airplane, browsing through some third-party computer code looking for a particular programming function (a block of code that performs a given task). In the file I was looking in, all the functions manipulated strings of characters functions, so all of them were prefixed with "str," short for "string," and pronounced "stir."

I passed such functions as strcpy (copy a string of characters), strcmp (compare two strings), and strlen (get the length of the string), then I came across another one: strfry.

The description of the function? "Sauté string briskly."

It was so out-of-the-blue in the staid programming code that I started laughing. Even though it obviously wasn't the function I was looking for, I had to do a little more digging to find out what the function did. Apparently it randomizes the order of the letters in the string. Apt.