the fairy godmother's last theorem
When I was a kid we had one of those battery-operated Casio teaching pianos, and among the songs it taught you to play was "Bibbity Bobbity Boo," from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. This song caused me no end of consternation as a kid, as its first lines asserted:
Salagadoola, Mishakaboola, Bibbity Bobbity Boo,
Put them together and what have you got? Bibbity Bobbity Boo.
What did it mean? Were Salagadoola and Mishakaboola so insignificant that they did not rate in the final account, or did Bibbity Bobbity Boo have some kind of nearly-infinite value that rendered the other elements insignificant? Or was Salagadoola perhaps equal to negative Menchikaboola, so that the quantities canceled out?
Oh, my naïve reasoning. Some enterprising geek has taken a computer-science approach and seen far deeper into the problem.
Salagadoola is a schema, Mishakaboola is a package, and Bibbitybobbityboo is a function or procedure. Put them together and what have you got? Bibbitybobbityboo.
This is the strongest of the cases thus far, since Bibbitybobbityboo, as the only function in this configuration, would be the only component capable of being the thingamabob that does the job. A variant on this theme would be for Bibbitybobbityboo to be a synonym for a Salagadoola.Mishakaboola package/function combination, but thats not as strong a case. Additional cases can be made for Bibbitybobbityboo being a Java class, or a method associated with an abstract data type, or a trigger on a Mishakaboola table. With so many options, its not surprising that the Bibbitybobbityboo Theorem remained unsolved until now.
It's no wonder I could never get my magical incantations to work as a child. I'm having enough trouble trying to redact the mining laws of twelve western states into a computer-readable package.
