I am assuming that using the return value of log was buggy, and so this tested that you could save it in a variable. I don't remember the exact semantics of log, but if it's like println!, it returns (), which is useless, so binding it to a variable is something you'd never write in real code, so it's "weird" in that sense.
This would be something the Boomer generation grew up with, and I think maybe the previous generation too. They're still around but they've certainly faded; they used to be Lego-level popular kids toys back then. They are named after President Lincoln, but only as a marketing tactic to use some of his reputation, there's no real connection.
I would imagine even some native English speakers are learning something with this post. I haven't seen them in a while.
There’s a strong connection between President Lincoln and log cabins. He grew up in a series of log cabins, and this fact was widely known during his campaign.
I'm a late millennial, and I'd sometimes see them as a kid too. I'm not sure about more recent generations, but I think that they might have stuck around longer than you might think.
> They were named after President Lincoln, but only as a marketing tactic
> there's no real connection
Funny--I always thought it was meant to be a pun on linkin', as in you're linkin' the logs together because they have those slots that fit precisely together on the ends.
I think it's both that and the popular tale of Lincoln having been born in a log cabin (which for some reason I thought I had heard wasn't actually true, but from looking into it now, it seems like a lot of sources say it is, so maybe I heard wrong?)
They were still pretty common when I was a kid in the early '80s. genX'ers and older millennials born in the US are likely to know about them, or perhaps even have had a set of them (I did).
To understand what evil_lincoln is doing, you have to understand very old Rust. Here's the commit that introduced it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/664b0ad3fcead4fe4d2...
log was a keyword to print stuff to the screen. Hence the joke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Logs Now that log is the println! macro, the joke is lost.It doesn't say explicitly why this is "weird", but given some other comments in the file,
I am assuming that using the return value of log was buggy, and so this tested that you could save it in a variable. I don't remember the exact semantics of log, but if it's like println!, it returns (), which is useless, so binding it to a variable is something you'd never write in real code, so it's "weird" in that sense.