Quote from Douglas Adams - when asked about the meaning of life and 42:
"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an
ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations,
base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk,
stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."
Of course everyone knows that the real reason was a macro misrepresentation:
#include <stdio.h>
#define SIX 1 + 5
#define NINE 8 + 1
int main(void)
{
printf( "What do you get if you multiply %d by %d? %d\n", SIX, NINE, SIX * NINE );
return 0;
}
You'll see that done with the errors in macros done by computer logic that the answer to this is 42
Of course the real answer was corrupted as the Earth was destroyed before the supercomputer (also known as Earth) was still computing the answer at the time