>>>>Make him/her maintain old COBOL programs for the rest of his/her life.
>>>
>>>No, modifying uncommented APL is an even worse fate...
>>
>>Or Autocoder...8^)
>
>Nowhere near as terse or cryptic - three lines of APL often was equivalent to hundreds or thousands of lines of FORTRAN. I spent many evenings as an undergrad playing "whut duzzit dew?"

Regarding APL -- I will take your word for it, Ed. The Jurassic period in my career mostly involved COBOL, various assemblers, and a few other languages thrown in for good measure. APL was never part of my experience, but come to think of it, I have heard more than a few folks verbalize profoundly disparaging utterances about it. Your comment above is "the icing on the cake," so to speak.

I think we can agree that having to spend eternity debugging "spaghetti code" in any ancestral language would probably not be severe enough punishment for any criminal who deliberately develops and disseminates a virus. Violent forms of torture come to mind, but I suppose that by advocating such things, we would be placing ourselves on an even lower level than that of the perpetrator.