dream journal

shalmestere had left some pieces of paper lying around for me to see. I picked one up and concluded it was a recipe, written in 19th-century English, for compost -- in the gardening sense, not the preserved-root-vegetables sense. In fact, looking at the others, I realized there were at least a dozen different recipes for varietal composts, presumably for different garden conditions. And each one ended with a series of "if" statements and a list of book titles. At length I realized that the "if" statements were actually conditional-compilation directives (if the C preprocessor had been based on 19th-century English), and the book titles, all by the same 20th-century female author, were effectively include directives: if you ran the whole thing as a script, you would get the full text of all her novels, with the compost recipe inserted at all and only those places where it was appropriate to the setting.