The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000
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Title: The Jargon File, Version 4.2.2, 20 Aug 2000
Editor: Eric S. Raymond
Guy L. Steele
Release date: January 1, 2002 [eBook #3008]
Most recently updated: April 15, 2022
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3008
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#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.2.2, 20 AUG 2000 =======#
This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker
slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore,
and humor.
This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be
freely used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no
legal restraints on what you can do with it, but there are
traditions about its proper use to which many hackers are quite
strongly attached. Please extend the courtesy of proper citation
when you quote the File, ideally with a version number, as it
will change and grow over time. (Examples of appropriate citation
form: "Jargon File 4.2.2" or "The on-line hacker Jargon File,
version 4.2.2, 20 AUG 2000".)
The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture.
Over the years a number of individuals have volunteered
considerable time to maintaining the File and been recognized by
the net at large as editors of it. Editorial responsibilities
include: to collate contributions and suggestions from others; to
seek out corroborating information; to cross-reference related
entries; to keep the file in a consistent format; and to announce
and distribute updated versions periodically. Current volunteer
editors include:
Eric Raymond
Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is
considered good form to check with an editor before quoting the
File in a published work or commercial product. We may have
additional information that would be helpful to you and can
assist you in framing your quote to reflect not only the letter
of the File but its spirit as well.
All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a
volunteer editor are gratefully received and will be regarded,
unless otherwise labelled, as freely given donations for possible
use as part of this public-domain file.
From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished,
edited, and formatted for commercial publication with the
cooperation of the volunteer editors and the hacker community at
large. If you wish to have a bound paper copy of this file, you
may find it convenient to purchase one of these. They often
contain additional material not found in on-line versions. The
two `authorized' editions so far are described in the Revision
History section; there may be more in the future.
Introduction: The purpose and
scope of this File
A Few Terms: Of Slang, Jargon
and Techspeak
Revision History: How the
File came to be
Jargon Construction: How
hackers invent jargon
Hacker Writing Style:
How they write
Email Quotes: And the Inclusion
Problem
Hacker Speech Style:
How hackers talk
International Style:
Some notes on usage outside the U.S.
Lamer-speak: Crackers, Phreaks,
and Lamers
Pronunciation Guide: How
to read the pronunciation keys
Other Lexicon
Conventions: How to read lexicon entries
Format for New
Entries: How to submit new entries for the File
The Jargon Lexicon: The
lexicon itself
Appendix A: Hacker Folklore
Appendix B: A Portrait of J.
Random Hacker
Appendix C: Helping Hacker
Culture Grow
Bibliography: For your further
enjoyment
Node:Introduction, Next:A Few Terms, Previous:Top, Up:Top
Introduction
This document is a collection of slang terms used by various
subcultures of computer hackers. Though some technical material
is included for background and flavor, it is not a technical
dictionary; what we describe here is the language hackers use
among themselves for fun, social communication, and technical
debate.
The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked
collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some
important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It
has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes,
taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly
creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of
`normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and
conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 40
years old.
As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps
hold their culture together -- it helps hackers recognize each
other's places in the community and expresses shared values and
experiences. Also as usual, not knowing the slang (or
using it inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane,
or (worst of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly even a suit. All human cultures use slang in this
threefold way -- as a tool of communication, and of inclusion,
and of exclusion.
Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled
perhaps in the slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine
artists but hard to detect in most technical or scientific
cultures; parts of it are code for shared states of
consciousness. There is a whole range of altered states
and problem-solving mental stances basic to high-level hacking
which don't fit into conventional linguistic reality any better
than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's `trompe l'oeil'
compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang
encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple
example, take the distinction between a kluge and an elegant solution, and the differing
connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of
engineering significance; it reaches right back into the nature
of the generative processes in program design and asserts
something important about two different kinds of relationship
between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich
in implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that
illuminate the hackish psyche.
But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are
very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These
traits seem to be common in young children, but the
conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an
educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before
adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of
the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process.
Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to
be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display
an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of
language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful
intelligence. Further, the electronic media which knit them
together are fluid, `hot' connections, well adapted to both the
dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak and
superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us
perhaps a uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic
evolution in action.
Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and
anthropological assumptions. For example, it has recently become
fashionable to speak of `low-context' versus `high-context'
communication, and to classify cultures by the preferred context
level of their languages and art forms. It is usually claimed
that low-context communication (characterized by precision,
clarity, and completeness of self-contained utterances) is
typical in cultures which value logic, objectivity,
individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context
communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal,
heavily coded) is associated with cultures which value
subjectivity, consensus, cooperation, and tradition. What then
are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around extremely
low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily
"low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly
high-context slang style?
The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a
compilation of hacker slang a particularly effective window into
the surrounding culture -- and, in fact, this one is the latest
version of an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File',
maintained by hackers themselves for over 15 years. This one
(like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also includes
topic entries which collect background or sidelight information
on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to subsume under
individual slang definitions.
Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is
intended that the material be enjoyable to browse. Even a
complete outsider should find at least a chuckle on nearly every
page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But it is
also true that hackers use humorous wordplay to make strong,
sometimes combative statements about what they feel. Some of
these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes
that have been genuinely passionate; this is deliberate. We have
not tried to moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we have
attempted to ensure that everyone's sacred cows get
gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish
virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints
is.
The reader with minimal computer background who finds some
references incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We
have not felt it either necessary or desirable to eliminate all
such; they, too, contribute flavor, and one of this document's
major intended audiences -- fledgling hackers already partway
inside the culture -- will benefit from them.
A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is
included in Appendix A. The
`outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to the
Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. Appendix C, the Bibliography, lists some non-technical
works which have either influenced or described the hacker
culture.
Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each
individual must choose by action to join), one should not be
surprised that the line between description and influence can
become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the Jargon
File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and
the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations,
and we hope and expect that this one will do likewise.
Node:A Few Terms, Next:Revision History,
Previous:Introduction,
Up:Top
Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak
Linguists usually refer to informal language as `slang' and
reserve the term `jargon' for the technical vocabularies of
various occupations. However, the ancestor of this collection was
called the `Jargon File', and hacker slang is traditionally `the
jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no
convenient way to distinguish it from what a linguist
would call hackers' jargon -- the formal vocabulary they learn
from textbooks, technical papers, and manuals.
To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker
slang and the vocabulary of technical programming and computer
science is fuzzy, and shifts over time. Further, this vocabulary
is shared with a wider technical culture of programmers, many of
whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish
slang.
Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the
facts of usage permit about the distinctions among three
categories:
`slang': informal language from mainstream English or
non-technical subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).
`jargon': without qualifier, denotes informal `slangy'
language peculiar to or predominantly found among hackers -- the
subject of this lexicon.
`techspeak': the formal technical vocabulary of programming,
computer science, electronics, and other fields connected to
hacking.
This terminology will be consistently used throughout the
remainder of this lexicon.
The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of
techspeak originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing
uptake of jargon into techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of
jargon arises from overgeneralization of techspeak terms (there
is more about this in the Jargon Construction section
below).
In general, we have considered techspeak any term that
communicates primarily by a denotation well established in
textbooks, technical dictionaries, or standards documents.
A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems,
languages, or documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker
folklore that isn't covered in formal sources, or sometimes to
convey critical historical background necessary to understand
other entries to which they are cross-referenced. Some other
techspeak senses of jargon words are listed in order to make the
jargon senses clear; where the text does not specify that a
straight technical sense is under discussion, these are marked
with `[techspeak]' as an etymology. Some entries have a primary
sense marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings explained
in terms of it.
We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent
origins of terms. The results are probably the least reliable
information in the lexicon, for several reasons. For one thing,
it is well known that many hackish usages have been independently
reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and
intricate neologisms. It often seems that the generative
processes underlying hackish jargon formation have an internal
logic so powerful as to create substantial parallelism across
separate cultures and even in different languages! For another,
the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly that `first
use' is often impossible to pin down. And, finally, compendia
like this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping
cultural approval on terms and widening their use.
Despite these problems, the organized collection of
jargon-related oral history for the new compilations has enabled
us to put to rest quite a number of folk etymologies, place
credit where credit is due, and illuminate the early history of
many important hackerisms such as kluge, cruft, and
foo. We believe specialist
lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than
casually instructive.
Node:Revision History, Next:Jargon Construction,
Previous:A Few
Terms, Up:Top
Revision History
The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon
from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI
lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10
communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI).
The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the
File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this
time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in
1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in
it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model
Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to
the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered
and may be collectively considered `Version 1'.
In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the
File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy
of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to
`AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL
JARGON.
The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused
versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by
Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this
activity, nobody thought of correcting the term `jargon' to
`slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as
the Jargon File.
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly
thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File
(which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with
periodic resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard
Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT
and ITS-related coinages.
In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large
chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution
Quarterly" (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil
Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly
cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper
publication.
A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the
mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in
1983 as "The Hacker's Dictionary" (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN
0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don
Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did
Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of
print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as
the Steele-1983 coauthors.
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File
effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was
due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the
production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the
`temporary' freeze to become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by
funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use
vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew
whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated
LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI
technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to
startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West
in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the
central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI
hackers' beloved ITS.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980,
although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science
Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more
than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the
interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix
standard.
In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished
the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the
Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's
compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things.
Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was
a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how
wide its influence was to be.
By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend
that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and
softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures
far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong
and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as
the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a
tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related
materials such as the Some AI
Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred
epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic
exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in
hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon
File, having passed from living document to icon, remained
essentially untouched for seven years.
This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late
version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were
dropped after careful consultation with the editors of
Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text,
omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced
in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.
This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File;
its aim is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all
the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature
is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from
Usenet and represent jargon now
current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have
been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC
programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM
mainframe world.
Eric S. Raymond maintains the new File with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr.;
these are the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial
`we', though we take pleasure in acknowledging the special
contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email
all additions, corrections, and correspondence relating to the
Jargon File to jargon@thyrsus.com.
(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file but
are not guaranteed to be correct later than the revision
date on the first line. Don't email us if an attempt to
reach your idol bounces -- we have no magic way of checking
addresses or looking up people.)
The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker's
Dictionary", by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN
0-262-68069-6.
The 3.0.0 version was published in September 1993 as the
second edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT
Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).
If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of
the major bookstore chains. Failing that, you can order by mail
from
The MIT Press 55 Hayward Street Cambridge, MA 02142
or order by phone at (800)-356-0343 or (617)-625-8481.
The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version
of the Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will
continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites
as a trust of the hacker community.
Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line
revisions:
Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again
after a seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions
were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of
UNIX, C, USENET, and microcomputer-based jargon were added at
that time.
Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy
for book. This version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551
characters, and 1702 entries.
Version 2.9.7, Oct 28 1991: first markup for hypertext
browser. This version had 19432 lines, 152132 words, 999595
characters, and 1750 entries.
Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the
book, including over fifty new entries and numerous
corrections/additions to old ones. Packaged with version 1.1 of
vh(1) hypertext reader. This version had 19509 lines, 153108
words, 1006023 characters, and 1760 entries.
Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon. This
version had 20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and
1821 entries.
Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material.
This version had 21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters,
and 1891 entries.
Version 2.9.11, Jan 01 1993: lots of new historical material.
This version had 21725 lines, 171169 words, 1125880 characters,
and 1922 entries.
Version 2.9.12, May 10 1993: a few new entries & changes,
marginal MUD/IRC slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all
in preparation for 2nd Edition of TNHD. This version had 22238
lines, 175114 words, 1152467 characters, and 1946 entries.
Version 3.0.0, Jul 27 1993: manuscript freeze for 2nd edition
of TNHD. This version had 22548 lines, 177520 words, 1169372
characters, and 1961 entries.
Version 3.1.0, Oct 15 1994: interim release to test WWW
conversion. This version had 23197 lines, 181001 words, 1193818
characters, and 1990 entries.
Version 3.2.0, Mar 15 1995: Spring 1995 update. This version
had 23822 lines, 185961 words, 1226358 characters, and 2031
entries.
Version 3.3.0, Jan 20 1996: Winter 1996 update. This version
had 24055 lines, 187957 words, 1239604 characters, and 2045
entries.
Version 3.3.1, Jan 25 1996: Copy-corrected improvement on
3.3.0 shipped to MIT Press as a step towards TNHD III. This
version had 24147 lines, 188728 words, 1244554 characters, and
2050 entries.
Version 3.3.2, Mar 20 1996: A number of new entries pursuant
on 3.3.2. This version had 24442 lines, 190867 words, 1262468
characters, and 2061 entries.
Version 3.3.3, Mar 25 1996: Cleanup before TNHD III manuscript
freeze. This version had 24584 lines, 191932 words, 1269996
characters, and 2064 entries.
Version 4.0.0, Jul 25 1996: The actual TNHD III version after
copy-edit. This version had 24801 lines, 193697 words, 1281402
characters, and 2067 entries.
Version 4.1.0, 8 Apr 1999: The Jargon File rides again after
three years. This version had 25777 lines, 206825 words, 1359992
characters, and 2217 entries.
Version 4.1.1, 18 Apr 1999: Corrections for minor errors in
4.1.0, and some new entries. This version had 25921 lines, 208483
words, 1371279 characters, and 2225 entries.
Version 4.1.2, 28 Apr 1999: Moving texi2html out of the
production path. This version had 26006 lines, 209479 words,
1377687 characters, and 2225 entries.
Version 4.1.3, 14 Jun 1999: Minor updates and markup fixes.
This version had 26108 lines, 210480 words, 1384546 characters,
and 2234 entries.
Version 4.1.4, 17 Jun 1999: Markup fixes for framed HTML. This
version had 26117 lines, 210527 words, 1384902 characters, and
2234 entries.
Version 4.2.0, 31 Jan 2000: Fix processing of URLs. This
version had 26598 lines, 214639 words, 1412243 characters, and
2267 entries.
Version 4.2.1, 5 Mar 2000: Point release to test new
production machinery. This version had 26647 lines, 215040 words,
1414942 characters, and 2269 entries.
Version 4.2.2, 12 Aug 2000: This version had 27171 lines,
219630 words, 1444887 characters, and 2302 entries.
Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as
_major_._minor_._revision_. Major version 1 is
reserved for the `old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version
2 encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with assistance
from GLS (Guy L. Steele, Jr.) leading up to and including the
second paper edition. From now on, major version number N.00 will
probably correspond to the Nth paper edition. Usually later
versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier
versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions
around.
Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and
assistance, and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here)
who contributed entries and encouragement. More thanks go to several of
the old-timers on the Usenet group _alt.folklore.computers_, who
contributed much useful commentary and many corrections and valuable
historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer, Bernie Cosell, Earl
Boebert, and Joe Morris.
We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished
linguists. David Stampe and Charles Hoequist contributed valuable
criticism; Joe Keane helped us improve the pronunciation guides.
A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian
A. LaMacchia for obtaining permission for us to use material from the
"TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes contributed some appropriate
material from his excellent book "Life With UNIX". We thank Per
Lindberg, author of the remarkable Swedish-language 'zine
"Hackerbladet", for bringing "FOO!" comics to our attention and
smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon files out
to us. Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing the
inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained. And
our gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC for securing us permission
to quote from PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy.
It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of
Mark Brader and Steve Summit to the File and Dictionary; they have read
and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an
amazing number of thoughtful comments, and done yeoman service in
catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their rare combination of
enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and
precisionism in matters of language has been of invaluable help.
Indeed, the sustained volume and quality of Mr. Brader's input over
several years and several different editions has only allowed him to
escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.
Finally, George V. Reilly helped with TeX arcana and painstakingly
proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric Tiedemann contributed
sage advice throughout on rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.
Node:Jargon Construction,
Next:Hacker
Writing Style, Previous:Revision History, Up:Top
How Jargon Works
Jargon Construction
There are some standard methods of jargonification that became
established quite early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such
sources as the Tech Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR
hackers, and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These
include verb doubling, soundalike slang, the `-P' convention,
overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and
anthropomorphization. Each is discussed below. We also cover the
standard comparatives for design quality.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization,
anthropomorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations
have become quite general; but soundalike slang is still largely
confined to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P'
convention is found only where LISPers flourish.
Verb Doubling: Doubling a verb
may change its semantics
Soundalike Slang: Punning
jargon
The -P convention: A
LISPy way to form questions
Overgeneralization:
Standard abuses of grammar
Spoken
Inarticulations: Sighing and <*sigh*>ing
Anthropomorphization:
Homunculi, daemons, and confused programs
Comparatives: Standard
comparatives for design quality
Node:Verb Doubling, Next:Soundalike Slang, Up:Jargon Construction
Verb Doubling
A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use
it as an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!".
Most of these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as
a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied
subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a
conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of
affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples
involve win, lose, hack, flame, barf,
chomp:
"The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose."
"Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."
"Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!"
Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not
immediately obvious from the verb. These have their own listings
in the lexicon.
The Usenet culture has one
tripling convention unrelated to this; the names of
`joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first
and paradigmatic example was
_alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork_ (a "Muppet Show"
reference); other infamous examples have included:
_alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg_
_alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die_
_comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk_
_sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom_
_alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill_
Node:Soundalike Slang, Next:The -P convention,
Previous:Verb
Doubling, Up:Jargon
Construction
Soundalike slang
Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an
ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is
considered particularly flavorful
if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word;
thus the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's Journal" is
almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal'
or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in
fairly wide use include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald => Horrid (or Harried)
Boston Globe => Boston Glob
Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle
=> the Crocknicle (or the Comical)
New York Times => New York Slime
Wall Street Journal => Wall Street Urinal
However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the
moment. Standard examples include:
Data General => Dirty Genitals
IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly
Government Property --- Do Not Duplicate (on keys)
=> Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate
for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins
Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford)
=> Marginal Hacks Hall
Microsoft => Microsloth
Internet Explorer => Internet Exploiter
This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has
been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are
opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally
transparent.
Node:The -P convention,
Next:Overgeneralization, Previous:Soundalike Slang, Up:Jargon Construction
The `-P' convention
Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable `P';
from the LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a
predicate (a boolean-valued function). The question should expect
a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.)
At dinnertime:
Q: ``Foodp?''
A: ``Yeah, I'm pretty hungry.'' or ``T!''
At any time:
Q: ``State-of-the-world-P?''
A: (Straight) ``I'm about to go home.''
A: (Humorous) ``Yes, the world has a state.''
On the phone to Florida:
Q: ``State-p Florida?''
A: ``Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?''
[One of the best of these is a Gosperism. Once, when we were at a Chinese
restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like
to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry
was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]
Node:Overgeneralization, Next:Spoken
Inarticulations, Previous:The -P convention, Up:Jargon Construction
Overgeneralization
A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with
which techspeak items such as names of program tools, command
language primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to
contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing
analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the best-known examples)
Unix hackers often grep for things
rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries are
generalizations of exactly this kind.
Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as
well. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong
endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a
standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example,
because
porous => porosity
generous => generosity
hackers happily generalize:
mysterious => mysteriosity
ferrous => ferrosity
obvious => obviosity
dubious => dubiosity
Another class of common construction uses the suffix `-itude'
to abstract a quality from just about any adjective or noun. This
usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would
perform the same abstraction through `-iness' or `-ingness'.
Thus:
win => winnitude (a common exclamation)
loss => lossitude
cruft => cruftitude
lame => lameitude
Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they
argue, for example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe
ought to be called `lats' -- after all, they're measuring
latitude!
Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can
be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it
over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already
heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like
Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.
The suffix "-full" can also be applied in generalized and
fanciful ways, as in "As soon as you have more than one cachefull
of data, the system starts thrashing," or "As soon as I have more
than one headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down." A
common use is "screenfull", meaning the amount of text that will
fit on one screen, usually in text mode where you have no choice
as to character size. Another common form is "bufferfull".
However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making
techniques characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the
Pentagon; a hacker would never, for example, `productize',
`prioritize', or `securitize' things. Hackers have a strong
aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it
with contempt.
Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight
overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is
good form to mark them in some standard nonstandard way.
Thus:
win => winnitude, winnage
disgust => disgustitude
hack => hackification
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard
plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC
Dictionary includes an entry which implies that the plural of
`mouse' is meeces, and notes that
the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This latter has
apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among
railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years.
On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x'
may form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen
and boxen in the main text). Even
words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this
way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are
`frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather
than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see Unix, TWENEX in main
text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used, and `Unixen' was
not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after
it might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that
this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that
attract a Latinate plural. Finally, it has been suggested to
general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be
`polygoose'.
The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either
an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or
the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't
normally considered to apply.
This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite
well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language.
It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done
not to impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of
clarity.
Node:Spoken
Inarticulations, Next:Anthropomorphization, Previous:Overgeneralization,
Up:Jargon
Construction
Spoken inarticulations
Words such as `mumble', `sigh', and `groan' are spoken in
places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has
been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of
representing such noises on a comm link or in electronic mail,
MUDs, and IRC channels (interestingly, the same sorts of
constructions have been showing up with increasing frequency in
comic strips). Another expression sometimes heard is "Complain!",
meaning "I have a complaint!"
Node:Anthropomorphization,
Next:Comparatives,
Previous:Spoken Inarticulations, Up:Jargon Construction
Anthropomorphization
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the
hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software.
English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look
down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software,
considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive
misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely,
frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and
desires.
Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as
though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with
intentions and desires. Thus, one hears "The protocol handler got
confused", or that programs "are trying" to do things, or one may
say of a routine that "its goal in life is to X". One even hears
explanations like "... and its poor little brain
couldn't understand X, and it died." Sometimes modelling things
this way actually seems to make them easier to understand,
perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything
with a really complex behavioral repertoire as `like a person'
rather than `like a thing'.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs
actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among
the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd
that they would use language that seemds to ascribe conciousness
to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands
examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't
done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the
sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe
that the things they work on every day are `alive'. To the
contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a
vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of
human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic
ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the
minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people
are biological machines - consciousness is an interesting and
valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery
which is not fundamentally different in information-processing
capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the
difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a
substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one;
what matters, what makes a thing `alive', is information and
richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it
implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all
machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of `consciousness'
according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept a that a human machine can have
intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe
consciousness and intention to complex patterned systems such as
computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or
less absurd to say that "The program wants to go into an infinite
loop" than it is to say that "I want to go eat some chocolate" -
and even defensible to say that "The stone, once dropped, wants
to move towards the center of the earth".
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy.
Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three
stances: the "physical stance" (thing-to-be-explained as a
physical object), the "design stance" (thing-to-be-explained as
an artifact), and the "intentional stance" (thing-to-be-explained
as an agent with desires and intentions). Which stances are
appropriate is a matter not of truth but of utility. Hackers
typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more
complex ones are modelled using the intentional stance.
Node:Comparatives, Previous:Anthropomorphization,
Up:Jargon
Construction
Comparatives
Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be
understood as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially
true of the adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and
functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct
spectrum:
monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose
misfeature
crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection
The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but
never actually attained. Another similar scale is used for
describing the reliability of software:
broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle
solid robust bulletproof armor-plated
Note, however, that `dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish
(it is rare in the U.S.) and may change places with `flaky' for
some speakers.
Coinages for describing lossage
seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic
inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more
words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious
people.
Node:Hacker Writing Style,
Next:Email Quotes,
Previous:Jargon
Construction, Up:Top
Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by
overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more
general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that
shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent
reports that he consistently misspells `wrong' as `worng'. Others
have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by
observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no
verb", or "Too repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa
cing." Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of
phrases relating to confusion or things that are confusing; `dain
bramage' for `brain damage' is perhaps the most common
(similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm
cixelsyd today", rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of
thing is quite common and is enjoyed by all concerned.
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like
parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if
"Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are "Bill runs" and "Spock
groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going",
"Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to
standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas
and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is
counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with
characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples
that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style
quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating
command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a
real pain in the neck.
Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing
"dd".
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing
"dd."
but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be
prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in
vi(1) dot repeats the last command accepted. The net
result would be to delete two lines!
The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.
Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in
Great Britain, though the older style (which became established
for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of
comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there.
"Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and
Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting.
This returns British English to the style Latin languages
(including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan) have been using all
along.
Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between
`scare' quotes and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style
single quotes for marking and reserve American-style double
quotes for actual reports of speech or text included from
elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as
correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone
to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage
appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk
of mine until I checked with Usenet --ESR]. One further
permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish
tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single
quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on
string and character literal syntax in some programming languages
(reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals
display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single
quote).
One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of Unix hackers in particular is a
tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase
(including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to
remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of
sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such
identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the
`spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an
appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and
confusing them can lead to lossage). A way of escaping this dilemma is
simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of
sentences.
There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard
hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more
important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter
create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded
without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that
other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend
to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to
appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the contrast
between `loose' form and `tight' content in jargon is a
substantial part of its humor!
Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and
emphasis conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII
communications links, and these are occasionally carried over
into written documents even when normal means of font changes,
underlining, and the like are available.
One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS
`LOUD', and this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex
that a person who goes to caps-lock while in talk mode may be asked to "stop shouting,
please, you're hurting my ears!".
Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters
to signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the
*hell*?" even though this interferes with the common use of the
asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also
common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with
book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman
wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's
earlier novel of the future military, _Starship_Troopers_.").
Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are
occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the
first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them
italic, and the second keeps them from falling over). On FidoNet,
you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text, which was actually
interpreted by some reader software. Finally, words may also be
emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under
them on the next line of the text.
There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this*
(which emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like*
*this* (which suggests the writer speaking very slowly and
distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally impaired
person). Bracketing a word with the `*' character may also
indicate that the writer wishes readers to consider that an
action is taking place or that a sound is being made. Examples:
*bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*, *mumble*.
One might also see the above sound effects as <bang>,
<hic>, <ring>, <grin>, <kick>,
<stomp>, <mumble>. This use of angle brackets to mark
their contents originally derives from conventions used in BNF, but since about 1993 it has been
reinforced by the HTML markup used on the World Wide Web.
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term
stands for some random member of a
larger class (this is straight from BNF). Examples like the following are common:
So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day...
There is also an accepted convention for `writing under
erasure'; the text
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman,
he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er,
gentleman...", with irony emphasized. The digraph
^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and
was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the
text was being composed the characters would be echoed and
printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace
keystrokes would be echoed with the string '^H'. Of course, the
final composed text would have no trace of the backspace
characters (or the original erroneous text).
This convention parallels (and may have been influenced by)
the ironic use of `slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to
previous text. This custom faded in email as more mailers got
good editing capabilities, only to tale on new life on IRCs and
other line-based chat systems.
I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding".
This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools
ed and sed, but is widely recognized by
non-Unix hackers as well.
In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two
asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this
derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256.
Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently
uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead
2^8 = 256. This goes all the way back to Algol-60,
which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became the
caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC,
which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and
dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to
reinforce the convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^
for exponention.) The notation is mildly confusing to C
programmers, because ^ means bitwise exclusive-or in
C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990
snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.
In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or
improper fractions (`3.5' or `7/2') rather than `typewriter
style' mixed fractions (`3-1/2'). The major motive here is
probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced font,
together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be
read as `three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely
preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal
representation; there may be some cultural influence here from
the high status of scientific notation.
Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or
very small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from
FORTRAN). This is a form of `scientific notation' using `e' to
replace `*10^'; for example, one year is about 3e7 seconds
long.
The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of
`approximately'; that is, ~50 means `about
fifty'.
On Usenet and in the MUD world,
common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as
|, &, ||,
&&, !, ==,
!=, >, <,
>=, and =< are often combined
with English. The Pascal not-equals, <>, is
also recognized, and occasionally one sees /= for
not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of
prefix `!' as a loose synonym for `not-' or `no-' is particularly
common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue' or `clueless'.
A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming
languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For
example, one might see the following:
In <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:
>I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
>Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
>right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
>kind of neat, but its performance left something
>to be desired.
Yeah, I tried one out too.
#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
#endif /* FLAME */
I guess they figured the price premium for true
frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget.
#include <disclaimer.h>
--
== Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)
In the above, the #ifdef/#endif pair
is a conditional compilation syntax from C; here, it implies that
the text between (which is a flame)
should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on)
the switch FLAME. The #include at the end is C for
"include standard disclaimer here"; the `standard disclaimer' is
understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and
not to be construed as the official position of my employer."
The top section in the example, with > at the left margin,
is an example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.
More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World
Wide Web, pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar
purposes:
<flame>
Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!
</flame>
You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:
<flame intensity="100%">
You seem well-suited for a career in government.
</flame>
Another recent (late 1990s) construction now common on USENET
seems to be borrowed from Perl. It consists of using a dollar
sign before an uppercased form of a word or acronym to suggest
any random member of the class
indicated by the word. Thus: `$PHB' means "any random member of
the class `Pointy-Haired Boss'".
Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in
mainstream usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to
write a digit sequence where you intend the reader to understand
the text string that names that number in English. So, hackers
prefer to write `1970s' rather than `nineteen-seventies' or
`1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive).
It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less
reluctance to use multiply-nested parentheses than is normal in
English. Part of this is almost certainly due to influence from
LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses (like this (see?)) in
its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a more
basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and
pushing systems to their limits is in operation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line
communication have shown that electronic links have a
de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of the body-language
cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend to
forget everything about other parties except what is presented
over that ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good
one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down
hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is that it may
encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in
response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of
conscious formal _politesse_ in their writing that has
passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for
example, the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon).
Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in
person communicate with considerable fluency over the net,
perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level
that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel stressed
and anxious as they would face to face.
Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters
for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on
literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future
historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great
tradition of personal letters as art.
Node:Email Quotes, Next:Hacker Speech Style,
Previous:Hacker Writing Style, Up:Top
Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions
One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in
some flux is the marking of included material from earlier
messages -- what would be called `block quotations' in ordinary
English. From the usual typographic convention employed for these
(smaller font at an extra indent), there derived a practice of
included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001)
character, which under Unix and many other environments gives the
appearance of an 8-space indent.
Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including
messages this way, so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD
Mail(1) was the first message agent to support
inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated its style. But the TAB
character tended to push included text too far to the right
(especially in multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly
wraparounds. After a brief period of confusion (during which an
inclusion leader consisting of three or four spaces became
established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading
> or > became standard, perhaps
owing to its use in ed(1) to display tabs
(alternatively, it may derive from the > that
some early Unix mailers used to quote lines starting with "From"
in text, so they wouldn't look like the beginnings of new message
headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their
> leaders, so the `nesting level' of a quotation
is visually apparent.
The practice of including text from the parent article when
posting a followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on
Usenet: the fact that articles do not arrive at different sites
in the same order. Careless posters used to post articles that
would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong"
or "I agree" or the like. It was hard to see who was responding
to what. Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software
evolved a facility to automatically include the text of a
previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster
chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant
lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post
articles containing the entire text of a preceding
article, followed only by "No, that's wrong" or "I
agree".
Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original
disease, and there soon appeared newsreader software designed to
let the reader skip over included text if desired. Today, some
posting software rejects articles containing too high a
proportion of lines beginning with `>' -- but this too has led
to undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of
zero-content filler lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the
message below the rejection threshold.
Because the default mailers supplied with Unix and other
operating systems haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the
older conventions using a leading TAB or three or four spaces are
still alive; however, >-inclusion is now clearly the prevalent
form in both netnews and mail.
Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the
`correct' inclusion style occasionally lead to holy wars.
Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it
will immediately follow. The preferred, conversational style
looks like this,
> relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
> relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt
or for short messages like this:
> entire message
response to message
Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will
occasionally see the entire quoted message after the
response, like this
response to message
> entire message
but this practice is strongly deprecated.
Though > remains the standard inclusion
leader, | is occasionally used for extended
quotations where original variations in indentation are being
retained (one mailer even combines these and uses
|>). One also sees different styles of quoting a
number of authors in the same message: one (deprecated because it
loses information) uses a leader of > for
everyone, another (the most common) is
> > > > , > > >
, etc. (or >>>> ,
>>>, etc., depending on line length and
nesting depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet
another is to use a different citation leader for each author,
say > , : , | ,
} (preserving nesting so that the inclusion order
of messages is still apparent, or tagging the inclusions with
authors' names). Yet another style is to use each
poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that
poster.
Occasionally one sees a # leader used for
quotations from authoritative sources such as standards
documents; the intended allusion is to the root prompt (the
special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the
privileged super-user).
Node:Hacker Speech Style,
Next:International
Style, Previous:Email Quotes, Up:Top
Hacker Speech Style
Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction,
careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and
relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor,
irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued --
but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are essential. One
should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and
identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or
a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky
and the mark of a loser.
This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English
normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in
technical fields. In contrast with the methods of jargon
construction, it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom.
It has been observed that many hackers are confused by
negative questions -- or, at least, that the people to whom they
are talking are often confused by the sense of their answers. The
problem is that they have done so much programming that
distinguishes between
if (going) ...
and
if (!going) ...
that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it may
seem to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?",
and so to merit an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses
English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer
as though the negative part weren't there. In some other
languages (including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish
interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise.
Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French
`si', German `doch', or Dutch `jawel' - a word with which one
could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question. (See
also mu)
For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use
double negatives, even if they live in a region where colloquial
usage allows them. The thought of uttering something that
logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be misparsed
as a negative tends to disturb them.
In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering
questions containing logical connectives with a strictly literal
rather than colloquial interpretation. A non-hacker who is
indelicate enough to ask a question like "So, are you working on
finding that bug now or leaving it until later?" is
likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes,
I'm doing it either now or later, and you didn't ask
which!").
Node:International Style,
Next:Lamer-speak,
Previous:Hacker
Speech Style, Up:Top
International Style
Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker
usage in American English, we have made some effort to get input
from abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often
uses translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to
them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are
interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to
travelling hackers.
There are some references herein to `Commonwealth hackish'.
These are intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as
reported in the English spoken in Great Britain and the
Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. -- though Canada is
heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry on
Commonwealth Hackish
reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from
U.S. hackish.
Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report
that they often use a mixture of English and their native
languages for technical conversation. Occasionally they develop
idioms in their English usage that are influenced by their
native-language styles. Some of these are reported here.
On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and
vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian
hackers often use the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll)
and `deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italian `scorrere'
and `cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been
seen conjugated in Swedish. In German, many Unix terms in English
are casually declined as if they were German verbs - thus:
mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept;
fork/forken/geforkt; core dump/core-dumpen, core-gedumpt. And
Spanish-speaking hackers use `linkar' (to link), `debugear' (to
debug), and `lockear' (to lock).
European hackers report that this happens partly because the
English terms make finer distinctions than are available in their
native vocabularies, and partly because deliberate
language-crossing makes for amusing wordplay.
A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where
they are parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to
English-speakers.
Node:Lamer-speak, Next:Pronunciation Guide,
Previous:International Style, Up:Top
Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet
hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum
of `pirate boards' inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly
teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have
developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by
skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't
(they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor
Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true
multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with
hackerdom's. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so the
reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board
systems.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz usage:
Misspell frequently. The substitutions
phone => fone
freak => phreak
are obligatory.
Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" ->
"codez"). The substitution of 'z' for 's' has evolved so that a
'z' is bow systematically put at the end of words to denote an
illegal or cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz,
passez, utilz, MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz,
serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.
Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey
Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").
Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome")
frequently.
Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").
TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL
THE TIME.
These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who originated as a parody of naive BBS users; also of his latter-day equivalent
Jeff K.. Occasionally, this sort
of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm by a real hacker, as
in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!
d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
The only practice resembling this in actual hacker usage is
the substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or
service felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve,
Micro$oft.
For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see
lamer, elite, leech, poser, cracker, and especially warez d00dz, banner site, ratio site, leech mode.
Node:Pronunciation Guide,
Next:Other
Lexicon Conventions, Previous:Lamer-speak, Up:Top
How to Use the Lexicon
Pronunciation Guide
Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all
entries that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in
standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket
phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the
following conventions:
Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or
back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks
a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If
no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal
accentuation on all syllables (this is common for
abbreviations).
Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter
`g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is
soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the
sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as
in "pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of
"loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of
"bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter
names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/.
/Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local
dialect.
Vowels are represented as follows:
/a/
back, that
/ah/
father, palm (see note)
/ar/
far, mark
/aw/
flaw, caught
/ay/
bake, rain
/e/
less, men
/ee/
easy, ski
/eir/
their, software
/i/
trip, hit
/i:/
life, sky
/o/
block, stock (see note)
/oh/
flow, sew
/oo/
loot, through
/or/
more, door
/ow/
out, how
/oy/
boy, coin
/uh/
but, some
/u/
put, foot
/y/
yet, young
/yoo/
few, chew
/[y]oo/
/oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or
/nyooz/)
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or
occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an
upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables
containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color'
would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and
/kuhl'*r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found
in standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken
by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech in the
Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia).
However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in
standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents
resembling British Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as
possible to map the pronunciations into their local dialect by
ignoring some subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of
British RP, for example, can smash terminal /r/ and all
unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern
American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth.
(Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this
purpose because it has crisp consonants and more vowel
distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain
distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be
what your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages.
(No, Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like
previous pronunciation'!)
Node:Other Lexicon
Conventions, Next:Format for New Entries,
Previous:Pronunciation Guide, Up:Top
Other Lexicon Conventions
Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather
than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common
in mainstream dictionaries), except that all entries beginning
with nonalphabetic characters are sorted after Z. The
case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.
The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon
(:) at the left margin. This convention helps out
tools like hypertext browsers that benefit from knowing where
entry boundaries are, but aren't as context-sensitive as
humans.
In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see {}
used to bracket words which themselves have entries in the File.
This isn't done all the time for every such word, but it is done
everywhere that a reminder seems useful that the term has a
jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its entry.
In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are
distinguished from those for ordinary entries by being followed
by "::" rather than ":"; similarly, references are surrounded by
"{{" and "}}" rather than "{" and "}".
Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in `slanted
type'. A defining instance is one which occurs near to or as part
of an explanation of it.
Prefixed ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of
incorrect usage.
We follow the `logical' quoting convention described in the
Writing Style section above. In addition, we reserve double
quotes for actual excerpts of text or (sometimes invented)
speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word being used in a
nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an
utterance into the string of letters or words that name it) are
both rendered with single quotes.
References such as malloc(3) and
patch(1) are to Unix facilities (some of which, such
as patch(1), are actually freeware distributed over
Usenet). The Unix manuals use foo(n) to refer to
item foo in section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities,
n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and
n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections
4, 5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in
any case are not referred to in any of the entries.
Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are
summarized here:
_abbrev._
abbreviation
_adj._
adjective
_adv._
adverb
_alt._
alternate
_cav._
caveat
_conj._
conjunction
_esp._
especially
_excl._
exclamation
_imp._
imperative
_interj._
interjection
_n._
noun
_obs._
obsolete
_pl._
plural
_poss._
possibly
_pref._
prefix
_prob._
probably
_prov._
proverbial
_quant._
quantifier
_suff._
suffix
_syn._
synonym (or synonymous with)
_v._
verb (may be transitive or intransitive)
_var._
variant
_vi._
intransitive verb
_vt._
transitive verb
Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given,
_alt._ separates two possibilities with nearly equal
distribution, while _var._ prefixes one that is markedly
less common than the primary.
Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or
is known to have originated there, we have tried to so indicate.
Here is a list of abbreviations used in etymologies:
Amateur Packet Radio
A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and TCP/IP
for wide-area networking and BBS systems.
Berkeley
University of California at Berkeley
BBN
Bolt, Beranek & Newman
Cambridge
the university in England (not the city in
Massachusetts where MIT happens to be located!)
CMU
Carnegie-Mellon University
Commodore
Commodore Business Machines
DEC
The Digital Equipment Corporation (now Compaq).
Fairchild
The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group
FidoNet
See the FidoNet entry
IBM
International Business Machines
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT
AI Lab culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups,
including the Tech Model Railroad Club
NRL
Naval Research Laboratories
NYU
New York University
OED
The Oxford English Dictionary
Purdue
Purdue University
SAIL
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford
University)
SI
From _Système International_, the name for the
standard conventions of metric nomenclature used in the
sciences
Stanford
Stanford University
Sun
Sun Microsystems
TMRC
Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club
(TMRC) at MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged
Dictionary of the TMRC Language", originally compiled by Pete
Samson in 1959
UCLA
University of California at Los Angeles
UK
the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern
Ireland)
Usenet
See the Usenet entry
WPI
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active
community of PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s
WWW
The World-Wide-Web.
XEROX PARC
XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering
research in user interface design and networking
Yale
Yale University
Some other etymology abbreviations such as Unix and PDP-10
refer to technical cultures surrounding specific operating
systems, processors, or other environments. The fact that a term
is labelled with any one of these abbreviations does not
necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture. In
particular, many terms labelled `MIT' and `Stanford' are in quite
general use. We have tried to give some indication of the
distribution of speakers in the usage notes; however, a number of
factors mentioned in the introduction conspire to make these
indications less definite than might be desirable.
A few new definitions attached to entries are marked
[proposed]. These are usually generalizations suggested by
editors or Usenet respondents in the process of commenting on
previous definitions of those entries. These are not
represented as established jargon.
Node:Format for New
Entries, Next:The Jargon Lexicon, Previous:Other
Lexicon Conventions, Up:Top
Format For New Entries
You can mail submissions for the Jargon File to jargon@snark.thyrsus.com.
We welcome new jargon, and corrections to or amplifications of
existing entries. You can improve your submission's chances of
being included by adding background information on user
population and years of currency. References to actual usage via
URLs and/or DejaNews pointers are particularly welcomed.
All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will
be considered donations to be placed in the public domain as part
of this File, and may be used in subsequent paper editions.
Submissions may be edited for accuracy, clarity and
concision.
We are looking to expand the File's range of technical
specialties covered. There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet
untapped in the scientific computing, graphics, and networking
hacker communities; also in numerical analysis, computer
architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many other
related fields. Send us your jargon!
We are not interested in straight technical terms
explained by textbooks or technical dictionaries unless an entry
illuminates `underground' meanings or aspects not covered by
official histories. We are also not interested in `joke' entries
-- there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally
out of the explanations of what hackers do and how they
think.
It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they
have spread to the point of being used by people who are not
personally acquainted with you. We prefer items to be attested by
independent submission from two different sites.
An HTML version of the File is available at
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon. Please send us URLs for materials
related to the entries, so we can enrich the File's link
structure.
The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made
available for browsing on the World Wide Web, and will include a
version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute -- this is
your monument!
Node:The Jargon Lexicon,
Next:Appendix A,
Previous:Format for New Entries, Up:Top
The Jargon Lexicon
= 0 =:
= A =:
= B =:
= C =:
= D =:
= E =:
= F =:
= G =:
= H =:
= I =:
= J =:
= K =:
= L =:
= M =:
= N =:
= O =:
= P =:
= Q =:
= R =:
= S =:
= T =:
= U =:
= V =:
= W =:
= X =:
= Y =:
= Z =:
Node:= 0 =, Next:= A =, Up:The Jargon Lexicon
= 0 =
0:
1TBS:
120 reset:
2:
404:
404 compliant:
4.2:
@-party:
Node:0, Next:1TBS,
Up:= 0 =
0
Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter `O' (the 15th letter of
the English alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot
alike, and various kluges invented to make them visually distinct
have compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and
letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero
looks more like an American football stood on end (or the
reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display
(though the dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on
IBM 3270 controllers). If your zero is slashed but letter-O is
not, you're probably looking at an old-style ASCII graphic set
descended from the default typewheel on the venerable ASR-33
Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom Ø is a letter, curse
this arrangement). (Interestingly, the slashed zero long predates
computers; Florian Cajori's monumental "A History of Mathematical
Notations" notes that it was used in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.) If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does
not, your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM
and a few other early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse
this arrangement even more, because it means two of
their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment displays
a zero with a reversed slash. Old CDC computers rendered
letter O as an unbroken oval and 0 as an oval broken at upper
right and lower left. And yet another convention common on early
line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to
the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive
capital letter-O (this was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for
how to draw ASCII characters, but the final standard changed the
distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left corner). Are we
sufficiently confused yet?
Node:1TBS, Next:120 reset, Previous:0, Up:= 0 =
1TBS // n.
The "One True Brace Style"; see indent style.
Node:120 reset, Next:2, Previous:1TBS, Up:= 0 =
120 reset /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ n.
[from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] To cycle power on a
machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare Big Red Switch, power cycle.
Node:2, Next:404,
Previous:120 reset,
Up:= 0 =
2 infix.
In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often
represents the syllable to with the connotation
`translate to': as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string
(integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff). Several
versions of a joke have floated around the internet in which some
idiot programmer fixes the Y2K bug by changing all the Y's in
something to K's, as in Januark, Februark, etc.
Node:404, Next:404 compliant, Previous:2, Up:= 0 =
404 // n.
[from the HTTP error "file not found on server"] Extended to
humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue -
sapience not found. May be used reflexively; "Uh, I'm 404ing"
means "I'm drawing a blank".
Node:404 compliant, Next:4.2, Previous:404, Up:= 0 =
404 compliant adj.
The status of a website which has been completely removed,
usually by the administrators of the hosting site as a result of
net abuse by the website operators. The term is a tongue-in-cheek
reference to the standard "301 compliant" Murkowski Bill
disclaimer used by spammers. See also: spam, spamvertize.
Node:4.2, Next:@-party, Previous:404 compliant, Up:= 0 =
4.2 /for' poynt too'/ n.
Without a prefix, this almost invariably refers to BSD Unix release 4.2. Note that it is an
indication of cluelessness to say "version 4.2", and "release
4.2" is rare; the number stands on its own, or is used in the
more explicit forms 4.2BSD or (less commonly) BSD 4.2. Similar
remarks apply to "4.3", "4.4" and to earlier, less-widespread
releases 4.1 and 2.9.
Node:@-party, Next:abbrev, Previous:4.2, Up:= 0 =
@-party /at'par`tee/ n.
[from the @-sign in an Internet address] (alt. `@-sign party'
/at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a
science-fiction convention (esp. the annual World Science Fiction
Convention or "Worldcon"); one must have a network address to get in, or at
least be in company with someone who does. One of the most
reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with
people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots
on their screens. Compare boink.
The first recorded @-party was held at the Westercon (a U.S.
western regional SF convention) over the July 4th weekend in
1980. It is not clear exactly when the canonical @-party venue
shifted to the Worldcon but it had certainly become established
by Constellation in 1983. Sadly, the @-party tradition has been
in decline since about 1996, mainly because having an @-address
no longer functions as an effective lodge pin.
Node:= A =, Next:= B =, Previous:= 0 =, Up:The Jargon Lexicon
= A =
abbrev:
ABEND:
accumulator:
ACK:
Acme:
acolyte:
ad-hockery:
Ada:
address harvester:
adger:
admin:
ADVENT:
AFAIK:
AFJ:
AFK:
AI:
AI-complete:
AI koans:
AIDS:
AIDX:
airplane rule:
Alderson loop:
aliasing bug:
Alice and Bob:
all-elbows:
alpha geek:
alpha particles:
alt:
alt bit:
Aluminum Book:
ambimouseterous:
Amiga:
Amiga Persecution
Complex:
amoeba:
amp off:
amper:
Angband:
angle brackets:
angry fruit salad:
annoybot:
annoyware:
ANSI:
ANSI standard:
ANSI standard
pizza:
AOL!:
app:
arena:
arg:
ARMM:
armor-plated:
asbestos:
asbestos cork
award:
asbestos longjohns:
ASCII:
ASCII art:
ASCIIbetical order:
astroturfing:
atomic:
attoparsec:
AUP:
autobogotiphobia:
automagically:
avatar:
awk:
Node:abbrev, Next:ABEND, Previous:@-party, Up:=
A =
abbrev /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n.
Common abbreviation for `abbreviation'.
Node:ABEND, Next:accumulator, Previous:abbrev, Up:= A
=
ABEND /a'bend/, /*-bend'/ n.
[ABnormal END] 1. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives from an error message on the
IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but seriously mainly by code grinders. Usually
capitalized, but may appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to
persuade you that ABEND is called `abend' because it is what
system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want
to call it a day, and hence is from the German `Abend' =
`Evening'. 2. [_alt.callahans_] Absent By Enforced Net
Deprivation - used in the subject lines of postings warning
friends of an imminent loss of Internet access. (This can be
because of computer downtime, loss of provider, moving or
illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = `Absent By
Voluntary Net Deprivation' and ABSEND = `Absent By Self-Enforced
Net Deprivation' have been sighted.
Node:accumulator, Next:ACK, Previous:ABEND, Up:= A
=
accumulator n. obs.
1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym
for `register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has
been around for quite a while and/or that the architecture under
discussion is quite old. The term in full is almost never used of
microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for
arithmetic registers beginning in `A' derive from historical use
of the term `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic').
Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand
for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A
register being used for arithmetic or logic (as opposed to
addressing or a loop index), especially one being used to
accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context
of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine
uses A3 as an accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among
old-timers who might use sense 1). "You want this reviewed? Sure,
just put it in the accumulator." (See stack.)
Node:ACK, Next:Acme, Previous:accumulator, Up:= A =
ACK /ak/ interj.
1. [common; from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge.
Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream
Yo!). An appropriate response to ping or ENQ. 2. [from
the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of surprised
disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense
is not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following
exclamation point. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell
them you understand their point (see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an
overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". 4. An
affirmative. "Think we ought to ditch that damn NT server for a
Linux box?" "ACK!"
There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you
there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no
reply, or during a lull in talk
mode to see if the person has gone away (the standard
humorous response is of course NAK
(sense 1), i.e., "I'm not here").
Node:Acme, Next:acolyte, Previous:ACK, Up:= A =
Acme n.
The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and
non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson
(two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop.
The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company
Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from
Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as
an "Acme X" either means "This is insanely great", or, more likely,
"This looks insanely great
on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in
the foot with it." Compare pistol.
This term, specially cherished by American hackers and
explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes
from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In
these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever
attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His
attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube
Goldberg devices - rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps,
high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in
large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme name.
These devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent
ways.
Node:acolyte, Next:ad-hockery, Previous:Acme, Up:= A =
acolyte n. obs.
[TMRC] An OSU privileged enough to
submit data and programs to a member of the priesthood.
Node:ad-hockery, Next:Ada, Previous:acolyte, Up:= A
=
ad-hockery /ad-hok'*r-ee/ n.
[Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain
programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of
semi-intelligent behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For
example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing
errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a
program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with
some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to choke, presuming normal inputs are dealt
with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called
`ad-hackery', `ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), `ad-crockery'. See
also ELIZA effect.
Node:Ada, Next:address harvester, Previous:ad-hockery, Up:= A =
Ada n.
A Pascal-descended language that
was at one time made mandatory for Department of Defense software
projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in
observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might
expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by
committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous,
multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description wss "The
PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and
inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada
Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first
programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design
of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would
almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly
been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that
there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from
inside its vast, elephantine
bulk.
Node:address harvester, Next:adger, Previous:Ada, Up:= A
=
address harvester n.
A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic
looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are
benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most,
unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists to
spam. Address harvesters can be foiled
by a teergrube.
Node:adger, Next:admin, Previous:address harvester, Up:= A =
adger /aj'r/ vt.
[UCLA mutant of nadger, poss.
also from the middle name of an infamous tenured graduate student]
To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been
foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started
removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare
dumbass attack.
Node:admin, Next:ADVENT, Previous:adger, Up:= A
=
admin /ad-min'/ n.
Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or
on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer.
Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin'
(emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email
and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare
postmaster, sysop, system
mangler.
Node:ADVENT, Next:AFAIK, Previous:admin, Up:= A
=
ADVENT /ad'vent/ n.
The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by
Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the
mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and
expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in
1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or
Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only
six-letter filenames. See also vadding, Zork, and
Infocom.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since
expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag
lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green
fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X).
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You
are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The
`magic words' xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the
Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a
`Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2'
that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a
secondary entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z.
Node:AFAIK, Next:AFJ, Previous:ADVENT, Up:= A
=
AFAIK // n.
[Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
Node:AFJ, Next:AFK, Previous:AFAIK, Up:= A
=
AFJ // n.
Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate
April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet
and Internet; see kremvax for an
example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the only seasonal
holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet
and other hacker networks.
Node:AFK, Next:AI,
Previous:AFJ, Up:= A =
AFK
[MUD] Abbrev. for "Away From Keyboard". Used to notify others
that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. "Let's not
go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a phone
call". Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform others
of your absence when they try to talk with you. The term is not
restricted to MUDs, however, and has become common in many chat
situations, from IRC to Unix talk.
Node:AI, Next:AI-complete, Previous:AFK, Up:= A =
AI /A-I/ n.
Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the
full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
Node:AI-complete, Next:AI koans, Previous:AI, Up:= A =
AI-complete /A-I k*m-pleet'/ adj.
[MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in
AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the
`strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level
intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words,
just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem'
(building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The
Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand
and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may
appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1999) to solve
them have foundered on the amount of context information and
`intelligence' they seem to require. See also gedanken.
Node:AI koans, Next:AIDS, Previous:AI-complete, Up:= A =
AI koans /A-I koh'anz/ pl.n.
A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny
Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the
Lab's culture (several are included under Some AI Koans in Appendix A). See
also ha ha only
serious, mu, and hacker humor.
Node:AIDS, Next:AIDX, Previous:AI koans, Up:= A =
AIDS /aydz/ n.
Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a glob pattern that matches, but is not limited to,
Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of
practicing unsafe SEX. See virus, worm, Trojan horse, virgin.
Node:AIDX, Next:airplane rule, Previous:AIDS, Up:= A
=
AIDX /ayd'k*z/ n.
Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX,
especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some
hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches").
A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to
combine the two main currents of the Unix stream (BSD and USG Unix)
became a monstrosity to haunt
system administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are
created while many users are logged on, the load average jumps
quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the user
databases. For a quite similar disease, compare HP-SUX. Also, compare Macintrash, Nominal Semidestructor, ScumOS, sun-stools.
Node:airplane rule, Next:Alderson loop, Previous:AIDX, Up:= A =
airplane rule n.
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a
twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a
single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and
electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is
correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable
systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure
that you've built a really good basket. See also KISS Principle, elegant.
Node:Alderson loop, Next:aliasing bug, Previous:airplane rule, Up:= A =
Alderson loop n.
[Intel] A special version of an infinite loop where there is an exit
condition available, but inaccessible in the current
implementation of the code. Typically this is created while
debugging user interface code. An example would be when there is
a menu stating, "Select 1-3 or 9 to quit" and 9 is not allowed by
the function that takes the selection from the user.
This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a
modal message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons,
thereby disabling the entire program whenever the box came up.
The message box had the proper code for dismissal and even was
set up so that when the non-existent Ok button was pressed the
proper code would be called.
Node:aliasing bug, Next:Alice and Bob, Previous:Alderson loop, Up:= A =
aliasing bug n.
A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code
that does dynamic allocation, esp. via malloc(3) or
equivalent. If several pointers address (`aliases for') a given
hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or
reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then
referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
allocation history of the malloc arena. Avoidable by use of allocation strategies
that never alias allocated core, or by use of higher-level
languages, such as LISP, which employ
a garbage collector (see GC). Also
called a stale pointer
bug. See also precedence lossage, smash the stack, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, overrun screw, spam.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with
C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in
the Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
Node:Alice and Bob, Next:all-elbows, Previous:aliasing bug, Up:= A =
Alice and Bob n.
The archetypal individuals used as examples in discussions of
cryptographic protocols. Originally, theorists would say
something like: "A communicates with someone who claims to be B,
So to be sure, A tests that B knows a secret number K. So A sends
to B a random number X. B then forms Y by encrypting X under key
K and sends Y back to A" Because this sort of thing is is quite
hard to follow, theorists stopped using the unadorned letters A
and B to represent the main players and started calling them
Alice and Bob. So now we say "Alice communicates with someone
claiming to be Bob, and to be sure, So Alice tests that Bob knows
a secret number K. Alice sends to Bob a random number X. Bob then
forms Y by encrypting X under key K and sends Y back to Alice". A
whole mythology rapidly grew up around the metasyntactic names;
see http://www.conceptlabs.co.uk/alicebob.html.
In Bruce Schneier's definitive introductory text "Applied
Cryptography" (2nd ed., 1996, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN
0-471-11709-9) he introduces a table of dramatis personae headed
by Alice and Bob. Others include Carol (a participant in three-
and four-party protocols), Dave (a participant in four-party
protocols), Eve (an eavesdropper), Mallory (a malicious active
attacker), Trent (a trusted arbitrator), Walter (a warden), Peggy
(a prover) and Victor (a verifier). These names for roles are
either already standard or, given the wide popularity of the
book, may be expected to quickly become so.
Node:all-elbows, Next:alpha geek, Previous:Alice and Bob, Up:= A =
all-elbows adj.
[MS-DOS] Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC
program, such as the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities
that circulate on BBS systems:
unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the
resources that it needs without considering that other TSRs may
also be resident. One particularly common form of rudeness is
lock-up due to programs fighting over the keyboard interrupt. See
rude, also mess-dos.
Node:alpha geek, Next:alpha particles, Previous:all-elbows, Up:= A =
alpha geek n.
[from animal ethologists' `alpha male'] The most technically
accomplished or skillful person in some implied context. "Ask
Larry, he's the alpha geek here."
Node:alpha particles, Next:alt, Previous:alpha geek, Up:= A =
alpha particles n.
See bit rot.
Node:alt, Next:alt bit, Previous:alpha particles, Up:= A =
alt /awlt/
1. n. The alt shift key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard; see bucky bits, sense 2 (though typical PC
usage does not simply set the 0200 bit). 2. n. The `option' key
on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals that the speaker
hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also feature key, which is sometimes
incorrectly called `alt'). 3. n.,obs. [PDP-10; often
capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character
(ASCII 0011011), after the keycap labeling on some older
terminals; also `altmode' (/awlt'mohd/). This character was
almost never pronounced `escape' on an ITS system, in TECO, or under TOPS-10 -- always alt, as in "Type
alt alt to end a TECO command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for
"log onto the [ITS] system"). This usage probably arose because
alt is more convenient to say than `escape', especially when
followed by another alt or a character (or another alt
and a character, for that matter). 4. The _alt_
hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of newsgroups created by users
without a formal vote and approval procedure. There is a myth,
not entirely implausible, that _alt_ is acronymic for
"anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is simply
short for "alternative".
Node:alt bit, Next:Aluminum Book, Previous:alt, Up:= A
=
alt bit /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj.
See meta bit.
Node:Aluminum Book, Next:ambimouseterous, Previous:alt bit, Up:= A =
Aluminum Book n.
[MIT] "Common LISP: The Language", by Guy L. Steele Jr.
(Digital Press, first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note
that due to a technical screwup some printings of the second
edition are actually of a color the author describes succinctly
as "yucky green". See also book
titles.
Node:ambimouseterous, Next:Amiga, Previous:Aluminum Book, Up:= A =
ambimouseterous /am-b*-mows'ter-us/ or
/am-b*-mows'trus/ adj.
[modeled on _ambidextrous_] Able to use a mouse with
either hand.
Node:Amiga, Next:Amiga Persecution Complex,
Previous:ambimouseterous, Up:= A =
Amiga n
A series of personal computer models originally sold by
Commodore, based on 680x0 processors, custom support chips and an
operating system that combined some of the best features of
Macintosh and Unix with compatibility with neither.
The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world
standardized on IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining
serious market share, despite the fact that the first Amigas had
a substantial technological lead on the IBM XTs of the time.
Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of
enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the clones
(see Amiga
Persecution Complex). The traits of this culture are both
spoofed and illuminated in
The BLAZE Humor Viewer. The strength of the Amiga platform
seeded a small industry of companies building software and
hardware for the platform, especially in graphics and video
applications (see video
toaster).
Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any
R&D, allowing the competition to close Amiga's technological
lead. After Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 the technology passed
through several hands, none of whom did much with it. However,
the Amiga is still being produced in Europe under license and has
a substantial number of fans, which will probably extend the
platform's life considerably.
Node:Amiga Persecution
Complex, Next:amoeba,
Previous:Amiga, Up:= A =
Amiga Persecution Complex n.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of
bigot, those who believe that the
marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some kind
of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some
kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a
platform would obviously win over all, market pressures be
damned!) Those afflicted are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and
mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to
Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are
also common victims. Linux users used
to display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning;
some still do. See also newbie,
troll, holy
wars, weenie, Get a life!.
Node:amoeba, Next:amp off, Previous:Amiga Persecution Complex,
Up:= A =
amoeba n.
Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.
Node:amp off, Next:amper, Previous:amoeba, Up:= A
=
amp off vt.
[Purdue] To run in background. From the Unix shell `&'
operator.
Node:amper, Next:Angband, Previous:amp off, Up:=
A =
amper n.
Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (`&',
ASCII 0100110) character. See ASCII
for other synonyms.
Node:Angband, Next:angle brackets, Previous:amper, Up:= A =
Angband n. /ang'band/
Like nethack, moria, and rogue,
one of the large freely distributed Dungeons-and-Dragons-like
simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and
operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband
(compare elder days, elvish). Has been described as "Moria on
steroids"; but, unlike Moria, many aspects of the game are
customizable. This leads many hackers and would-be hackers into
fooling with these instead of doing productive work. There are
many Angband variants, of which the most notorious is probably
the rather whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does
not correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display
"Type ? for help" 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time,
random error messages including "An error has occurred because an
error of type 42 has occurred" and "Windows 95 uninstalled
successfully" will be displayed. Zangband also allows the player
to kill Santa Claus (who has some really good stuff, but also has
a lot of friends), "Bull Gates", and Barney the Dinosaur (but be
watchful; Barney has a nasty case of halitosis). There is an
official angband home page at http://www.phial.com/angband
and a zangband one at http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
See also Random Number
God.
Node:angle brackets, Next:angry fruit salad,
Previous:Angband, Up:= A =
angle brackets n.
Either of the characters < (ASCII 0111100) and
> (ASCII 0111110) (ASCII less-than or
greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use angle brackets which are
either taller and slimmer (the ISO `Bra' and `Ket' characters),
or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the
less-than and greater-than signs. See broket, ASCII.
Node:angry fruit salad,
Next:annoybot, Previous:angle brackets, Up:= A =
angry fruit salad n.
A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This
term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in
canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from
interface designers using color window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that
are flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term
use.
Node:annoybot, Next:annoyware, Previous:angry fruit salad, Up:= A =
annoybot /*-noy-bot/ n.
[IRC] See bot.
Node:annoyware, Next:ANSI, Previous:annoybot, Up:=
A =
annoyware n.
A type of shareware that
frequently disrupts normal program operation to display requests
for payment to the author in return for the ability to disable
the request messages. (Also called `nagware') The requests
generally require user action to acknowledge the message before
normal operation is resumed and are often tied to the most
frequently used features of the software. See also careware, charityware, crippleware, freeware, FRS,
guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare payware.
Node:ANSI, Next:ANSI standard, Previous:annoyware, Up:= A =
ANSI /an'see/
1. n. [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute.
ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards
(ISO), standardized the C programming language (see K&R, Classic
C), and promulgates many other important software
standards. 2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI'
if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control.
Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too
permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48
standard, which shares both flaws. 3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of
screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers
accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be
loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately,
neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match
the ANSI X.364 terminal standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code
turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM
PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright) colors. Also, in
BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a
particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half
character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context.
Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the
color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go
together.
Node:ANSI standard, Next:ANSI standard pizza,
Previous:ANSI, Up:= A =
ANSI standard /an'see stan'd*rd/
The ANSI standard usage of `ANSI standard' refers to any
practice which is typical or broadly done. It's most
appropriately applied to things that everyone does that are not
quite regulation. For example: ANSI standard shaking of a laser
printer cartridge to get extra life from it, or the ANSI standard
word tripling in names of usenet alt groups.
Node:ANSI standard pizza,
Next:AOL!, Previous:ANSI standard, Up:= A =
ANSI standard pizza /an'see stan'd*rd peet'z*/
[CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because
most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up
to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also rotary debugger; compare ISO standard cup of
tea.
Node:AOL!, Next:app, Previous:ANSI standard pizza, Up:= A =
AOL! n.
[Usenet] Common synonym for "Me, too!" alluding to the
legendary propensity of America Online users to utter contentless
"Me, too!" postings. The number of exclamation points following
varies from zero to five or so. The pseudo-HTML
<AOL>Me, too!</AOL>
is also frequently seen. See also September that never
ended.
Node:app, Next:arena, Previous:AOL!, Up:= A =
app /ap/ n.
Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems
program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing
developers to create for their environments so they can sell more
boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves
run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes
compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though
a user would consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is
often a self-contained environment for performing some
well-defined task such as `word processing'; hackers tend to
prefer more general-purpose tools.) See killer app; oppose tool, operating
system.
Node:arena, Next:arg, Previous:app,
Up:= A =
arena n.
[common; Unix] The area of memory attached to a process by
brk(2) and sbrk(2) and used by
malloc(3) as dynamic storage. So named from a
malloc: corrupt arena message emitted when some
early versions detected an impossible value in the free block
list. See overrun screw,
aliasing bug, memory leak, memory smash, smash the stack.
Node:arg, Next:ARMM, Previous:arena, Up:= A
=
arg /arg/ n.
Abbreviation for `argument' (to a function), used so often as
to have become a new word (like `piano' from `pianoforte'). "The
sine function takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take
either 1 or 2 args." Compare param,
parm, var.
Node:ARMM, Next:armor-plated, Previous:arg, Up:= A
=
ARMM n.
[acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet
cancelbot created by Dick Depew
of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel
posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's
recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own
automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this
stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of
Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March
31, 1993 and proceeded to spam
_news.admin.policy_ with a recursive explosion of over 200
messages.
ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically
added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its
parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header
took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got
longer and longer and longer.
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological
messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people
paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described
the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing
the term despew), and it has since
been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the
combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a
network. Compare Great Worm;
sorcerer's
apprentice mode. See also software laser, network meltdown.
Node:armor-plated, Next:asbestos, Previous:ARMM, Up:= A =
armor-plated n.
Syn. for bulletproof.
Node:asbestos, Next:asbestos cork award, Previous:armor-plated, Up:= A =
asbestos adj.
[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect
one from flames; also in other highly
flame-suggestive usages. See, for
example, asbestos
longjohns and asbestos cork award.
Node:asbestos cork award,
Next:asbestos
longjohns, Previous:asbestos, Up:=
A =
asbestos cork award n.
Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another
hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing
that said flamer had been nominated for the `asbestos cork
award'. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of
the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a
select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn
this dubious dignity -- but there is no agreement on
which few.
Node:asbestos longjohns,
Next:ASCII, Previous:asbestos cork
award, Up:= A =
asbestos longjohns n.
Notional garments donned by Usenet posters just before emitting a remark
they expect will elicit flamage.
This is the most common of the asbestos coinages. Also `asbestos underwear',
`asbestos overcoat', etc.
Node:ASCII, Next:ASCII art, Previous:asbestos longjohns, Up:= A =
ASCII /as'kee/ n.
[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant
character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard
version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier
codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961)
used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase
letters -- a major win -- but it did
not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not
used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature
which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse,
though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII
and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.
Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling
than humans; thus, hackers need to be very precise when talking
about characters, and have developed a considerable amount of
verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names
-- some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon names for
ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries
for bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat,
twiddle, and Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII
pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order;
character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each
character, common names are given in rough order of popularity,
followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official
ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square
brackets mark the particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and
"o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively.
Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage information.
!
Common: bang; pling; excl; shriek;
ball-bat; <exclamation mark>. Rare: factorial; exclam;
smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka; [spark-spot];
soldier, control.
"
Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark;
double-glitch; <quotation marks>; <dieresis>; dirk;
[rabbit-ears]; double prime.
#
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid;
crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; <square>, pig-pen;
tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.
$
Common: dollar; <dollar sign>. Rare: currency symbol;
buck; cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of
ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money].
%
Common: percent; <percent sign>; mod; grapes. Rare:
[double-oh-seven].
&
Common: <ampersand>; amper; and, and sign. Rare:
address (from C); reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand;
background (from sh(1)); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL
called this `ampersand'; what could be sillier?]
'
Common: single quote; quote; <apostrophe>. Rare: prime;
glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; <closing single quotation
mark>; <acute accent>.
( )
Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close;
paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r
banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen; <opening/closing
parenthesis>; o/c round bracket, l/r round bracket,
[wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
*
Common: star; [splat];
<asterisk>. Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle; mult; spider;
aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob); Nathan
Hale.
+
Common: <plus>; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].
,
Common: <comma>. Rare: <cedilla>; [tail].
-
Common: dash; <hyphen>; <minus>. Rare: [worm];
option; dak; bithorpe.
.
Common: dot; point; <period>; <decimal point>.
Rare: radix point; full stop; [spot].
/
Common: slash; stroke; <slant>; forward slash. Rare:
diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
:
Common: <colon>. Rare: dots; [two-spot].
;
Common: <semicolon>; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid],
pit-thwong.
< >
Common: <less/greater than>; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r
angle bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/{into, towards}; read
from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap
(all from UNIX); tic/tac; [angle/right angle].
=
Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe;
[half-mesh].
?
Common: query; <question mark>; ques. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh;
hook; buttonhook; hunchback.
@
Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl;
[whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage;
<commercial at>.
V
Rare: [book].
[ ]
Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; <opening/closing
bracket>; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U
turn back].
\
Common: backslash, hack, whack; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse
slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; <reverse
slant>; reversed virgule; [backslat].
^
Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>.
Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the
power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).
_
Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare:
score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
`
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote;
<grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark];
unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push;
<opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote.
{ }
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing
brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r
squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
|
Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare:
<vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from
UNIX); [spike].
~
Common: <tilde>; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung
dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].
The pronunciation of # as `pound' is common in
the U.S. but a bad idea; Commonwealth Hackish has its
own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on
British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace
#; thus Britishers sometimes call # on
a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American error).
The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice
of using a # suffix to tag pound weights on bills of
lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the
U.S. There are more culture wars over the correct pronunciation
of this character than any other, which has led to the ha ha only serious
suggestion that it be pronounced `shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in
an Old Testament or Tanakh).
The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for
underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963
version), which had these graphics in those character positions
rather than the modern punctuation characters.
The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same
as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both
(compare angle
brackets).
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The
#, $, >, and
& characters, for example, are all pronounced
"hex" in different communities because various assemblers use
them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular,
# in many assembler-programming cultures,
$ in the 6502 world, > at Texas
Instruments, and & on the BBC Micro, Sinclair,
and some Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the
world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7
bits look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of international
networks continues to increase (see software rot). Hardware and software
from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is
the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this
is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set
suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to
solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets
produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset
common to all those in use.
Node:ASCII art, Next:ASCIIbetical order, Previous:ASCII, Up:= A =
ASCII art n.
The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set
(mainly |, -, /,
\, and +). Also known as `character
graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also boxology. Here is a serious example:
o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O
L )||( | | | C U
A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T
C N )||( | | | | P
E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o U
)||( | | | GND T
o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+
A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit
And here are some very silly examples:
|\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___
| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \
| | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \
| (o)(o) U / \
C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/
| ,___| (oo) \/ \/
| / \/-------\ U (__)
/____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo )
/ \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\
//-o-\\
____---=======---____
====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK!
// ---\__O__/--- \\
\_\ /_/
There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the
standard character names in the fashion of a rebus.
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "
Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are
reproduced in the examples above, here are three more:
(__) (__) (__)
(\/) ($$) (**)
/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting
an Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand:
.-.
/___\
|___|
|]_[|
/ I \
JL/ | \JL
.-. i () | () i .-.
|_| .^. /_\ LJ=======LJ /_\ .^. |_|
._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._
., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., .,
JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JL
IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_
-------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]-
_/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ ||\
|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|__| ||=/_|_\=|| |__| ||-
|__| |||__|__||| |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__| |||__|__||| |__| |||
IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_]
\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_]
./ \.L_J/ \L_J./ L_JI I[]/ \[]I IL_J \.L_J/ \L_J./ \.L_J
| |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J
|_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J
There is a newsgroup, _alt.ascii-art_, devoted to this
genre; however, see also warlording.
Node:ASCIIbetical order,
Next:astroturfing,
Previous:ASCII art,
Up:= A =
ASCIIbetical order /as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ adj.,n.
Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order
rather than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in
something close to ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and
entries beginning with non-alphabetic characters moved to the
end. "At my video store, they used their computer to sort the
videos into ASCIIbetical order, so I couldn't find `"Crocodile"
Dundee' until I thought to look before `2001' and `48 HRS.'!"
Node:astroturfing, Next:atomic, Previous:ASCIIbetical order, Up:= A =
astroturfing n.
The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular
movement, through means like letters to newspapers from
soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the
formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded
by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This
term became common among hackers after it came to light in early
1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to
forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action
against the company.
This backfired horribly, angering a number of state
attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans
to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft
on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!".
Node:atomic, Next:attoparsec, Previous:astroturfing, Up:= A =
atomic adj.
[from Gk. `atomos', indivisible] 1. Indivisible; cannot be
split up. For example, an instruction may be said to do several
things `atomically', i.e., all the things are done immediately,
and there is no chance of the instruction being half-completed or
of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that an
operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. "This routine locks
the file and increments the file's semaphore atomically." 2.
[primarily techspeak] Guaranteed to complete successfully or not
at all, usu. refers to database transactions. If an error
prevents a partially-performed transaction from proceeding to
completion, it must be "backed out," as the database must not be
left in an inconsistent state.
Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the
connotations that `atomic' has in mainstream English (i.e. of
particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.).
Node:attoparsec, Next:AUP, Previous:atomic, Up:= A
=
attoparsec n.
About an inch. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for
multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26
light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years,
or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/microfortnight equals about 1
inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably
not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See micro-.
Node:AUP, Next:autobogotiphobia, Previous:attoparsec, Up:= A =
AUP /A-U-P/
Abbreviation, "Acceptable Use Policy". The policy of a given
ISP which sets out what the ISP considers to be (un)acceptable
uses of its Internet resources.
Node:autobogotiphobia, Next:automagically, Previous:AUP, Up:= A =
autobogotiphobia /aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/
n. See bogotify.
Node:automagically, Next:avatar, Previous:autobogotiphobia, Up:= A =
automagically /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ adv.
Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically
because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too
trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See
magic. "The C-INTERCAL compiler
generates C, then automagically invokes cc(1) to
produce an executable."
This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in
jargon and probably much earlier. The word `automagic' occurred
in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the
late 1940s.
Node:avatar, Next:awk, Previous:automagically, Up:= A =
avatar n. Syn.
[in Hindu mythology, the incarnation of a god] 1. Among people
working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar
is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual
reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs. 2. [CMU, Tektronix] root, superuser.
There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of the
superuser account is `avatar' rather than `root'. This quirk was
originated by a CMU hacker who found the terms `root' and
`superuser' unimaginative, and thought `avatar' might better
impress people with the responsibility they were accepting.
Node:awk, Next:B5,
Previous:avatar, Up:= A =
awk /awk/
1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging
text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian
Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is
characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to
variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and
field-oriented text processing. See also Perl. 2. n. Editing term for an expression
awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing
a newline). 3. vt. To process data
using awk(1).
Node:= B =, Next:= C =, Previous:= A =, Up:The Jargon Lexicon
= B =
B5:
back door:
backbone cabal:
backbone site:
backgammon:
background:
backreference:
backronym:
backspace and
overstrike:
backward
combatability:
BAD:
Bad and Wrong:
Bad Thing:
bag on the side:
bagbiter:
bagbiting:
baggy pantsing:
balloonian
variable:
bamf:
banana label:
banana problem:
banner ad:
banner site:
barn:
batbelt:
Befunge:
BI:
binary four:
bandwidth:
bang:
bang on:
bang path:
banner:
bar:
bare metal:
barf:
barfmail:
barfulation:
barfulous:
barney:
baroque:
BASIC:
batch:
bathtub curve:
baud:
baud barf:
baz:
bazaar:
bboard:
BBS:
BCPL:
beam:
beanie key:
beep:
beige toaster:
bells and
whistles:
bells whistles and
gongs:
benchmark:
Berkeley Quality
Software:
berklix:
Berzerkeley:
beta:
BFI:
bible:
BiCapitalization:
B1FF:
biff:
Big Gray Wall:
big iron:
Big Red Switch:
Big Room:
big win:
big-endian:
bignum:
bigot:
bit:
bit bang:
bit bashing:
bit bucket:
bit decay:
bit rot:
bit twiddling:
bit-paired
keyboard:
bitblt:
BITNET:
bits:
bitty box:
bixen:
bixie:
black art:
black hole:
black magic:
Black Screen of
Death:
Black Thursday:
blammo:
blargh:
blast:
blat:
bletch:
bletcherous:
blink:
blinkenlights:
blit:
blitter:
blivet:
bloatware:
BLOB:
block:
block transfer
computations:
Bloggs Family:
blow an EPROM:
blow away:
blow out:
blow past:
blow up:
BLT:
Blue Book:
blue box:
Blue Glue:
blue goo:
Blue Screen of
Death:
blue wire:
blurgle:
BNF:
boa:
board:
boat anchor:
bob:
bodysurf code:
BOF:
BOFH:
bogo-sort:
bogometer:
BogoMIPS:
bogon:
bogon filter:
bogon flux:
bogosity:
bogotify:
bogue out:
bogus:
Bohr bug:
boink:
bomb:
bondage-and-discipline
language:
bonk/oif:
book titles:
boot:
Borg:
borken:
bot:
bot spot:
bottom feeder:
bottom-up
implementation:
bounce:
bounce message:
boustrophedon:
box:
boxed comments:
boxen:
boxology:
bozotic:
BQS:
brain dump:
brain fart:
brain-damaged:
brain-dead:
braino:
branch to
Fishkill:
bread crumbs:
break:
break-even point:
breath-of-life
packet:
breedle:
Breidbart Index:
bring X to its
knees:
brittle:
broadcast storm:
brochureware:
broken:
broken arrow:
BrokenWindows:
broket:
Brooks's Law:
brown-paper-bag
bug:
browser:
BRS:
brute force:
brute force and
ignorance:
BSD:
BSOD:
BUAF:
BUAG:
bubble sort:
bucky bits:
buffer chuck:
buffer overflow:
bug:
bug-compatible:
bug-for-bug
compatible:
bug-of-the-month
club:
buglix:
bulletproof:
bullschildt:
bum:
bump:
burble:
buried treasure:
burn-in period:
burst page:
busy-wait:
buzz:
BWQ:
by hand:
byte:
byte sex:
bytesexual:
Bzzzt! Wrong.:
Node:B5, Next:back door, Previous:awk, Up:= B =
B5 //
[common] Abbreviation for "Babylon 5", a science-fiction TV
series as revered among hackers as was the original Star
Trek.
Node:back door, Next:backbone cabal, Previous:B5, Up:= B =
back door n.
[common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left
in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such
holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for
example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended
for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance
programmers. Syn. trap door;
may also be called a `wormhole'. See also iron box, cracker, worm,
logic bomb.
Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer
than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely
known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM
admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that
may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of
all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that
would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and
insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson,
giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been
created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from
the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler.
But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the
compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would
recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and
insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the
recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of
course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again
the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able
to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack
perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and
active but with no trace in the sources.
The talk that suggested this truly moby hack was published as
"Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27",
8 (August 1984), pp. 761-763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics).
Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented
and that the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of
a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was
never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports
that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs,
notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login
across the network by someone using the login name `kt'.
Node:backbone cabal, Next:backbone site, Previous:back door, Up:= B =
backbone cabal n.
A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the
Great Renaming and reined
in the chaos of Usenet during most
of the 1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was
sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it
was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to
respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities
of the group were speculated on in public.
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery.
Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988
following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or
claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only
gone deeper underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about
various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with
taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later
satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See Eric Conspiracy for one
example.
See NANA for the subsequent history
of "the Cabal".
Node:backbone site, Next:backgammon, Previous:backbone cabal, Up:= B =
backbone site n.,obs.
Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a
large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home
site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps.
Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the
term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide
availability of cheap Internet connections, included _uunet_
and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio
State University, and the University of Texas. Compare rib site, leaf site.
[1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP
network world that gave it meaning has nearly disappeared;
everyone is on the Internet now and network traffic is
distributed in very different patterns. Today one might see
references to a `backbone router' instead --ESR]
Node:backgammon, Next:background, Previous:backbone site, Up:= B =
backgammon
See bignum (sense 3), moby (sense 4), and pseudoprime.
Node:background, Next:backreference, Previous:backgammon, Up:= B =
background n.,adj.,vt.
[common] To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever
foreground matters are not
claiming your undivided attention, and `to background' something
means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just
print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the
graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies
ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in
contrast to mainstream `back burner' (which connotes benign
neglect until some future resumption of activity). Some people
prefer to use the term for processing that they have queued up
for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully
take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare
amp off, slopsucker.
Technically, a task running in background is detached from the
terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower
priority); oppose foreground.
Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears to have been first used in
this sense on OS/360.
Node:backreference, Next:backronym, Previous:background, Up:= B =
backreference n.
1. In a regular expression or pattern match, the text which
was matched within grouping parentheses parentheses. 2. The part
of the pattern which refers back to the matched text. 3. By
extension, anything which refers back to something which has been
seen or discussed before. "When you said `she' just now, who were
you backreferencing?"
Node:backronym, Next:backspace and overstrike,
Previous:backreference, Up:= B =
backronym n.
[portmanteau of back + acronym] A word interpreted as an
acronym that was not originally so intended. This is a special
case of what linguists call `back formation'. Examples are given
under BASIC, recursive acronym (Cygnus), Acme, and mung.
Discovering backronyms is a common form of wordplay among
hackers. Compare retcon.
Node:backspace and
overstrike, Next:backward combatability,
Previous:backronym, Up:= B =
backspace and overstrike interj.
[rare] Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said
or did something wrong. Once common among APL programmers; may
now be obsolete.
Node:backward
combatability, Next:BAD,
Previous:backspace and overstrike,
Up:= B =
backward combatability /bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/
n.
[CMU, Tektronix: from `backward compatibility'] A property of
hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols,
formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded in favor of `new
and improved' protocols, formats, and layouts, leaving the
previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated. (Too
often, the old and new versions cannot definitively be
distinguished, such that lingering instances of the previous ones
yield crashes or other infelicitous effects, as opposed to a
simple "version mismatch" message.) A backwards compatible
change, on the other hand, allows old versions to coexist without
crashes or error messages, but too many major changes
incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility processing can
lead to extreme software
bloat. See also flag
day.
Node:BAD, Next:Bad and Wrong, Previous:backward
combatability, Up:= B =
BAD /B-A-D/ adj.
[IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] Said of a program that is
bogus because of bad design and
misfeatures rather than because of bugginess. See working as designed.
Node:Bad and Wrong, Next:Bad Thing, Previous:BAD, Up:= B =
Bad and Wrong adj.
[Durham, UK] Said of something that is both badly designed and
wrongly executed. This common term is the prototype of, and is
used by contrast with, three less common terms - Bad and Right (a
kludge, something ugly but functional); Good and Wrong (an
overblown GUI or other attractive nuisance); and (rare praise)
Good and Right. These terms entered common use at Durham c.1994
and may have been imported from elsewhere; they are also in use
at Oxford, and the emphatic form "Evil, Bad and Wrong"
(abbreviated EBW) is reported fromm there. There are standard
abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo for "Bad and
Wrong". Consequently, B&W is actually "Bad and Right",
G&R = "Good and Wrong", and G&W = "Good and Right".
Compare evil and rude,
Good Thing, Bad Thing.
Node:Bad Thing, Next:bag on the side, Previous:Bad and Wrong, Up:= B =
Bad Thing n.
[very common; from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody "1066
And All That"] Something that can't possibly result in
improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as
in "Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle couriers
would be a Bad Thing". Oppose Good
Thing. British correspondents confirm that Bad Thing and Good Thing (and prob. therefore Right Thing and Wrong Thing) come from the book
referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good
Kings but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream
idiom on the British side of the pond. It is very common among
American hackers, but not in mainstream usage here. Compare Bad and Wrong.
Node:bag on the side, Next:bagbiter, Previous:Bad Thing, Up:= B =
bag on the side n.
[prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] An extension to
an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to
the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was
being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new
product is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also v. phrase, `to hang
a bag on the side [of]'. "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C
...." "They want me to hang a bag on the side of
the accounting system."
Node:bagbiter, Next:bagbiting, Previous:bag on the side, Up:= B =
bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to
work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor
won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters!
What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble,
inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the
computer properly. Synonyms: loser,
cretin, chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some
manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes,
the disk controller is really biting the bag."
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly
obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we
have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at
MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!"
was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their
current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's lexiphage program was
the first and to date only known example of a program
intended to be a bagbiter.
Node:bagbiting, Next:baggy pantsing, Previous:bagbiter, Up:= B =
bagbiting adj.
Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me
compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare losing, cretinous, bletcherous, `barfucious' (under barfulous) and `chomping' (under chomp).
Node:baggy pantsing, Next:balloonian variable,
Previous:bagbiting, Up:= B =
baggy pantsing v.
[Georgia Tech] A "baggy pantsing" is used to reprimand hackers
who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected
user will come back to find a post from them on internal
newsgroups discussing exactly how baggy their pants are, an
accepted stand-in for "unattentive user who left their work
unprotected in the clusters". A properly-done baggy pantsing is
highly mocking and humorous (see examples below). It is
considered bad form to post a baggy pantsing to off-campus
newsgroups or the more technical, serious groups. A particularly
nice baggy pantsing may be "claimed" by immediately quoting the
message in full, followed by your sig; this has the added benefit
of keeping the embarassed victim from being able to delete the
post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving adding
commands to login scripts to repost the message every time the
unlucky user logs in; Unix boxes on the residential network, when
cracked, oftentimes have their homepages replaced (after being
politely backedup to another file) with a baggy-pants message;
.plan files are also occasionally targeted. Usage: "Prof.
Greenlee fell asleep in the Solaris cluster again; we
baggy-pantsed him to git.cc.class.2430.flame."
Node:balloonian variable,
Next:bamf, Previous:baggy pantsing, Up:= B =
balloonian variable n.
[Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of
`boolean variable'?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or
control state, but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or
set. A typical balloonian variable started out as a flag attached
to some environment feature that either became obsolete or was
planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or
politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be
treated as though it were live.
Node:bamf, Next:banana label, Previous:balloonian variable, Up:= B =
bamf /bamf/
1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] interj. Notional
sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the
hearer's vicinity. Often used in virtual reality (esp. MUD) electronic fora
when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2.
The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality
fora like MUDs. 3. In MUD circles,
"bamf" is also used to refer to the act by which a MUD server
sends a special notification to the MUD client to switch its
connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site to just
bamf people over to our new location."). 4. Used by MUDders on
occasion in a more general sense related to sense 3, to refer to
directing someone to another location or resource ("A user was
asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/".)
Node:banana label, Next:banana problem, Previous:bamf, Up:= B =
banana label n.
The labels often used on the sides of macrotape reels, so called because they are
shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like
macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for
obsolescence.
Node:banana problem, Next:binary four, Previous:banana label, Up:= B =
banana problem n.
[from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to
spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing
where or when to bring a production to a close (compare fencepost error). One may say
`there is a banana problem' of an algorithm with poorly defined
or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the
evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see
also creeping elegance,
creeping featuritis).
See item 176 under HAKMEM, which
describes a banana problem in a Dissociated Press implementation.
Also, see one-banana
problem for a superficially similar but unrelated
usage.
Node:binary four, Next:bandwidth, Previous:banana problem, Up:= B =
binary four n.
[Usenet] The finger, in the sense of `digitus impudicus'. This
comes from an analogy between binary and the hand, i.e.
1=00001=thumb, 2=00010=index finger, 3=00011=index and thumb,
4=00100. Considered silly. Prob. from humorous derivative of
finger, sense 4.
Node:bandwidth, Next:bang, Previous:binary four, Up:= B =
bandwidth n.
1. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its
technical meaning) as the volume of information per unit time
that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle.
"Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail --
not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare low-bandwidth. This generalized usage
began to go mainstream after the Internet population explosion of
1993-1994. 2. Attention span. 3. On Usenet, a measure of network capacity that is
often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by
others are a waste of bandwidth.
Node:bang, Next:bang on, Previous:bandwidth, Up:= B =
bang
1. n. Common spoken name for ! (ASCII 0100001),
especially when used in pronouncing a bang path in spoken hackish. In elder days this was considered a
CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring excl or shriek;
but the spread of Unix has carried `bang' with it (esp. via the
term bang path) and it is now
certainly the most common spoken name for !. Note
that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written
!; one would not say "Congratulations bang" (except
possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the
exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See
shriek, ASCII. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying
roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has
cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge that one has
perpetrated a thinko immediately
after one has been called on it.
Node:bang on, Next:bang path, Previous:bang, Up:= B =
bang on vt.
To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on
the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't
crash once. I guess it is ready for release." The term pound on is synonymous.
Node:bang path, Next:banner, Previous:bang on, Up:=
B =
bang path n.
[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address
specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to
the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the path
_...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me_ directs people to route their
mail to machine _bigsite_ (presumably a well-known location
accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine
_foovax_ to the account of user _me_ on
_barbox_.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting
mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang
addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big
machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to
get mail to one of them reliably (example: _...!{seismo,
ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me_). Bang paths of 8 to 10
hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links
would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often
selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages
would often get lost. See Internet address, the network, and sitename.
Node:banner, Next:banner ad, Previous:bang path, Up:= B =
banner n.
1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers
(see spool). Typically includes user
or account ID information in very large character-graphics
capitals. Also called a `burst page', because it indicates where
to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's
printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated
(typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from
user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as Unix's
banner({1,6}). 3. On interactive software, a first
screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright
notice. This is probably now the commonest sense.
Node:banner ad, Next:banner site, Previous:banner, Up:=
B =
banner ad n.
Any of the annoying graphical advertisements that span the
tops of way too many Web pages.
Node:banner site, Next:bar, Previous:banner ad, Up:= B =
banner site n.
[warez d00dz] A FTP site storing pirated files where one must
first click on several banners and/or subscribe to various `free'
services, usually generating some form of revenues for the site
owner, to be able to access the site. More often than not, the
username/password painfully obtained by clicking on banners and
subscribing to bogus services or mailing lists turns out to be
non-working or gives access to a site that always responds busy.
See ratio site, leech mode.
Node:bar, Next:bare metal, Previous:banner site, Up:= B =
bar /bar/ n.
1. [very common] The second metasyntactic variable, after
foo and before baz. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR.
FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to foo to produce foobar.
Node:bare metal, Next:barf, Previous:bar, Up:= B =
bare metal n.
1. [common] New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares
and delusions as an operating
system, an HLL, or even
assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare
metal', which refers to the arduous work of bit bashing needed to create these basic
tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves
things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing
basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the
assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that
will give the new machine a real development environment. 2.
`Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style
of hand-hacking that relies on
bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp.
tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such
as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described
in The Story of Mel
(in Appendix A), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to
minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency).
This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs
of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is
still found in heavily constrained environments such as
industrial embedded systems, and in the code of hackers who just
can't let go of that low-level control. See Real Programmer.
In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming
(especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often
considered a Good Thing, or at
least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been
sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see
ill-behaved). There, the term
usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS interface and writing
the application to directly access device registers and machine
addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to
get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing
well are held in high regard.
Node:barf, Next:barfmail, Previous:bare metal, Up:= B =
barf /barf/ n.,v.
[common; from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj.
Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the
Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch. 2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some
similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and
he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he
literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable
input, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not.
Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by
0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to
divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation
to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The
text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing
out the old one." See choke, gag. In Commonwealth Hackish, `barf' is
generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'. barf is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like
foo or bar.
Node:barfmail, Next:barfulation, Previous:barf, Up:= B =
barfmail n.
Multiple bounce
messages accumulating to the level of serious annoyance,
or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network
mail gateway goes down or wonky.
Node:barfulation, Next:barfulous, Previous:barfmail, Up:=
B =
barfulation /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj.
Variation of barf used around the
Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some
particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote
this, Quux?"
Node:barfulous, Next:barn, Previous:barfulation, Up:= B =
barfulous /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj.
(alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that
would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
Node:barn, Next:barney, Previous:barfulous, Up:= B =
barn n.
[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] An unexpectedly
large quantity of something: a unit of measurement. "Why is
/var/adm taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to
several barns." The source of this is clear: when physicists were
first studying nuclear interactions, the probability was thought
to be proportional to the cross-sectional area of the nucleus
(this probability is still called the cross-section). Upon
experimenting, they discovered the interactions were far more
probable than expected; the nuclei were `as big as a barn'. The
units for cross-sections were christened Barns, (10^-24 cm^2) and
the book containing cross-sections has a picture of a barn on the
cover.
Node:barney, Next:baroque, Previous:barn, Up:= B =
barney n.
In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to fred (sense #1) as bar
is to foo. That is, people who commonly
use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use
`barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone
and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.
Node:baroque, Next:BASIC, Previous:barney, Up:= B
=
baroque adj.
[common] Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on
excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has
many of the connotations of elephantine or monstrosity but is less extreme and not
pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce
random variations to its letterform output. Now that is
baroque!" See also rococo.
Node:BASIC, Next:batbelt, Previous:baroque, Up:= B
=
BASIC /bay'-sic/ n.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's
experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for
many years was the leading cause of brain damage in
proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings
on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically
impossible to teach good programming style to students that have
had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another
case (like Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a
language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken
too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the
order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is
very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it
harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so
bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on
low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of
thousands of potential wizards.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty
any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and
control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose
Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic,
simply because it was a simple and basic programming language.
Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms,
BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No
acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can
verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around
the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC
because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code is the one that caught on.
Node:batbelt, Next:batch, Previous:BASIC, Up:= B
=
batbelt n.
Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers,
cell-phones, personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket
knives, flashlights, walkie-talkies, even miniature computers
from their belts. When many of these devices are worn at once,
the hacker's belt somewhat resembles Batman's utility belt; hence
it is referred to as a batbelt.
Node:batch, Next:bathtub curve, Previous:batbelt, Up:= B =
batch adj.
1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely
than the traditional technical definitions justify; in
particular, switches on a normally interactive program that
prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often
referred to as `batch mode' switches. A `batch file' is a series
of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program
running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one
sitting. "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks
for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on
next week..." 3. `batching up': Accumulation of a
number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater
efficiency. "I'm batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm
batching up bottles to take to the recycling center."
Node:bathtub curve, Next:baud, Previous:batch, Up:= B
=
bathtub curve n.
Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of
one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the
expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high,
dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising
again as it `tires out'. See also burn-in period, infant mortality.
Node:baud, Next:baud barf, Previous:bathtub curve, Up:= B =
baud /bawd/ n.
[simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second.
Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The
technical meaning is `level transitions per second'; this
coincides with bps only for two-level modulation with no framing
or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these nuances but
blithely ignore them.
Historical note: `baud' was originally a unit of telegraph
signalling speed, set at one pulse per second. It was proposed at
the November, 1926 conference of the Comité Consultatif
International Des Communications Télégraphiques as
an improvement on the then standard practice of referring to line
speeds in terms of words per minute, and named for Jean Maurice
Emile Baudot (1845-1903), a French engineer who did a lot of
pioneering work in early teleprinters.
Node:baud barf, Next:baz, Previous:baud, Up:= B =
baud barf /bawd barf/ n.
The garbage one gets a terminal (or terminal emulator) when
using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line
speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on
the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the
connection. Baud barf is not completely random, by the way; hackers with a lot of
serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the
other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal
is set to. Really experienced ones can identify
particular speeds.
Node:baz, Next:bazaar, Previous:baud barf, Up:= B =
baz /baz/ n.
1. [common] The third metasyntactic variable
"Suppose we have three functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls
BAR, which calls BAZ...." (See also fum) 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this
usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing
an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3.
Occasionally appended to foo to produce
`foobaz'.
Earlier versions of this lexicon derived `baz' as a Stanford
corruption of bar. However, Pete Samson
(compiler of the TMRC lexicon) reports
it was already current when he joined TMRC in 1958. He says "It
came from "Pogo". Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged,
would shout `Bazz Fazz!' or `Rowrbazzle!' The club layout was
said to model the (mythical) New England counties of Rowrfolk and
Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
(Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)."
Node:bazaar, Next:bboard, Previous:baz, Up:= B =
bazaar n.,adj.
In 1997, after meditatating on the success of Linux for three years, the Jargon File's own
editor ESR wrote an analytical paper on hacker culture and
development models titled The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. The main argument of the paper was
that Brooks's Law is not the
whole story; given the right social machinery, debugging can be
efficiently parallelized across large numbers of programmers. The
title metaphor caught on (see also cathedral), and the style of development
typical in the Linux community is now often referred to as the
bazaar mode. Its characteristics include releasing code early and
often, and actively seeking the largest possible pool of peer
reviewers.
Node:bboard, Next:BBS, Previous:bazaar, Up:= B
=
bboard /bee'bord/ n.
[contraction of `bulletin board'] 1. Any electronic bulletin
board; esp. used of BBS systems running
on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a
newsgroup generally marks one either as a newbie fresh in from the BBS world or as a real
old-timer predating Usenet). 2. At CMU and other colleges with
similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin
boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer
to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo
board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS
Lounge.
In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by
the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or
`market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the
better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at
CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".
Node:BBS, Next:BCPL, Previous:bboard, Up:= B
=
BBS /B-B-S/ n.
[common; abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] An electronic
bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people
can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped
(typically) into topic
groups. The term was especially applied to the thousands
of local BBS systems that operated during the pre-Internet
microcomputer era of roughly 1980 to 1995, typically run by
amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single
modem line each. Fans of Usenet and Internet or the big
commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie
tended to consider local BBSes the low-rent district of the
hacker culture, but they served a valuable function by knitting
together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world
who would otherwise have been unable to exchange code at all.
Post-Internet, BBSs are likely to be local newsgroups on an ISP;
efficiency has increased but a certain flavor has been lost. See
also bboard.
Node:BCPL, Next:beam, Previous:BBS,
Up:= B =
BCPL // n.
[abbreviation, `Basic Combined Programming Language') A
programming language developed by Martin Richards in Cambridge in
1967. It is remarkable for its rich syntax, small size of
compiler (it can be run in 16k) and extreme portability. It
reached break-even point at a very early stage, and was the
language in which the original hello
world program was written. It has been ported to so many
different systems that its creator confesses to having lost
count. It has only one data type (a machine word) which can be
used as an integer, a character, a floating point number, a
pointer, or almost anything else, depending on context. BCPL was
a precursor of C, which inherited some of its features.
Node:beam, Next:beanie key, Previous:BCPL, Up:= B =
beam vt.
[from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] 1. To
transfer softcopy of a file
electronically; most often in combining forms such as `beam me a
copy' or `beam that over to his site'. 2. Palm Pilot users very
commonly use this term for the act of exchanging bits via the
infrared links on their machines (this term seems to have
originated with the ill-fated Newton Message Pad). Compare blast, snarf,
BLT.
Node:beanie key, Next:beep, Previous:beam, Up:= B =
beanie key n.
[Mac users] See command
key.
Node:beep, Next:Befunge, Previous:beanie key, Up:= B =
beep n.,v.
Syn. feep. This term is techspeak
under MS-DOS and OS/2, and seems to be generally preferred among
micro hobbyists.
Node:Befunge, Next:beige toaster, Previous:beep, Up:= B
=
Befunge n.
A worthy companion to INTERCAL;
a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation
of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying
through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies. Sadly, the
Befunge home page has vanished, but a Befunge version of the
hello world program is at http://www.catseye.mb.ca/esoteric/befunge.html.
Node:beige toaster, Next:bells and whistles,
Previous:Befunge, Up:= B =
beige toaster n.
A Macintosh. See toaster;
compare Macintrash, maggotbox.
Node:bells and whistles,
Next:bells
whistles and gongs, Previous:beige toaster, Up:= B =
bells and whistles n.
[common] Features added to a program or system to make it more
flavorful from a hacker's point
of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its
primary function. Distinguished from chrome, which is intended to attract users.
"Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and
add some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what
distinguishes a bell from a whistle. The recognized emphatic form
is "bells, whistles, and gongs".
It used to be thought that this term derived from the toyboxes
on theater organs. However, the "and gongs" strongly suggests a
different origin, at sea. Before powered horns, ships routinely
used bells, whistles, and gongs to signal each other over longer
distances than voice can carry.
Node:bells whistles and
gongs, Next:benchmark,
Previous:bells
and whistles, Up:= B =
bells whistles and gongs n.
A standard elaborated form of bells and whistles; typically
said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the `gongs'.
Node:benchmark, Next:Berkeley Quality Software,
Previous:bells whistles and gongs,
Up:= B =
benchmark n.
[techspeak] An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In
the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn
lies, and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone,
Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see h), the
Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see gabriel), the SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See
also machoflops, MIPS, smoke
and mirrors.
Node:Berkeley Quality
Software, Next:berklix,
Previous:benchmark, Up:= B =
Berkeley Quality Software adj.
(often abbreviated `BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to
refer to software that was apparently created by rather
spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It
usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect documentation,
has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when
anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied
to early versions of the dbx(1) debugger. See also
Berzerkeley.
Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk'lee/,
not /bark'lee/ as in British Received Pronunciation.
Node:berklix, Next:Berzerkeley, Previous:Berkeley Quality Software,
Up:= B =
berklix /berk'liks/ n.,adj.
[contraction of `Berkeley Unix'] See BSD. Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more
common among suits attempting to sound
like cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say
`BSD'.
Node:Berzerkeley, Next:beta, Previous:berklix, Up:= B
=
Berzerkeley /b*r-zer'klee/ n.
[from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label;
poss. originated by famed columnist Herb Caen] Humorous
distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or
products of the BSD Unix hackers. See
software bloat, Missed'em-five, Berkeley Quality
Software.
Mainstream use of this term in reference to the cultural and
political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been
reported from as far back as the 1960s.
Node:beta, Next:BFI, Previous:Berzerkeley, Up:= B =
beta /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/
n.
1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with `in':
`in beta'. In the Real World,
systems (hardware or software) software often go through two
stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta
(out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of
lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers. 2. Anything that is new and
experimental. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still
testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Flaky;
dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).
Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a
pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of
software by making it available to selected (or self-selected)
customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s
terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but
later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the
unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial
system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests
for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability
evaluation done before any commitment to design and development.
The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model
functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's
beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production
design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model
had been in production a while.
Node:BFI, Next:bible, Previous:beta, Up:= B =
BFI /B-F-I/ n.
See brute force
and ignorance. Also encountered in the variants `BFMI',
`brute force and massive ignorance' and `BFBI' `brute
force and bloody ignorance'. In dome parts of the U.S. this
abbreviation was probably reinforced by a company called
Browning-Ferris Industries who used to be in the waste-management
business; a large BFI logo in white-on-blue could be seen on the
sides of garbage trucks.
Node:bible, Next:BiCapitalization, Previous:BFI, Up:= B =
bible n.
1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as
Knuth, K&R, or the Camel Book. 2. The most detailed and
authoritative reference for a particular language, operating
system, or other complex software system.
Node:BiCapitalization, Next:B1FF, Previous:bible, Up:= B
=
BiCapitalization n.
The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as
PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver,
EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common
coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many marketroid types think this sort of thing
is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare studlycaps.
Node:B1FF, Next:BI, Previous:BiCapitalization, Up:= B =
B1FF /bif/ [Usenet] (alt. `BIFF') n.
The most famous pseudo, and the
prototypical newbie. Articles from
B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with
bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF
CUZ HE"S A K00L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL
LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of
talk mode abbreviations, a long
sig block (sometimes even a
doubled sig), and unbounded
naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20.
B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from
a variety of sites. However, BITNET
seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a
denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid)
electronic mail address: B1FF@BIT.NET.
[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, also
the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible".
The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who
posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted
for the amusement of the net at large. See also Jeff K. --ESR]
Node:BI, Next:biff, Previous:B1FF, Up:= B =
BI //
Common written abbreviation for Breidbart Index.
Node:biff, Next:Big Gray Wall, Previous:BI, Up:= B =
biff /bif/ vt.
To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility
biff(1), which was in turn named after a friendly
dog who used to chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD
was in development. There was a legend that it had a habit of
barking whenever the mailman came, but the author of
biff says this is not true. No relation to B1FF.
Node:Big Gray Wall, Next:big iron, Previous:biff, Up:= B =
Big Gray Wall n.
What faces a VMS user searching for
documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the
documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the
addition of layered products such as compilers, databases,
multivendor networking, and programming tools. Recent (since VMS
version 5) documentation comes with gray binders; under VMS
version 4 the binders were orange (`big orange wall'), and under
version 3 they were blue. See VMS.
Often contracted to `Gray Wall'.
Node:big iron, Next:Big Red Switch, Previous:Big Gray Wall, Up:= B =
big iron n.
[common] Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used
generally of number-crunching supercomputers such
as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish
mainframes. Term of approval; compare heavy metal, oppose dinosaur.
Node:Big Red Switch, Next:Big Room, Previous:big iron, Up:= B =
Big Red Switch n.
[IBM] The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency
Pull' switch on an IBM mainframe
or the power switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and
red. "This !@%$% bitty box is
hung again; time to hit the Big Red Switch." Sources at IBM
report that, in tune with the company's passion for TLAs, this is often abbreviated as `BRS' (this has
also become established on FidoNet and in the PC clone world). It is alleged that the emergency
pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt
into the main power feed; the BRSes on more recent mainframes
physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed
back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially
inappropriately (see also molly-guard). Compare power cycle, three-finger salute, 120 reset; see also scram switch.
Node:Big Room, Next:big win, Previous:Big Red Switch, Up:= B =
Big Room n.
(Also `Big Blue Room') The extremely large room with the blue
ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black
ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found
outside all computer installations. "He can't come to the phone
right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room."
Node:big win, Next:big-endian, Previous:Big Room, Up:= B =
big win n.
1. [common] Major success. 2. [MIT] Serendipity. "Yes, those
two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a
batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to
their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See win big.
Node:big-endian, Next:bignum, Previous:big win, Up:=
B =
big-endian adj.
[common; From Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous
paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI
IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] 1. Describes a computer
architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric
representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address
(the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors, including
the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the
Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC
designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes
called `network order'. See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab. 2. An Internet address the wrong way
round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes
email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending
up with the name of the country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking
Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet
domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle
this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address
_me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as_ could be interpreted in JANET's
big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain _uk_) or in the
standard little-endian way as one in the domain _as_
(American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.
Node:bignum, Next:bigot, Previous:big-endian, Up:= B =
bignum /big'nuhm/ n.
[common; orig. from MIT MacLISP] 1. [techspeak] A
multiple-precision computer representation for very large
integers. 2. More generally, any very large number. "Have you
ever looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for
you!" 3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice
especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare moby, sense 4). See also El Camino Bignum.
Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages
provide a kind of data called `integer', but such computer
integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be
smaller than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a bitty box) 2^(15) (32,768). If you want to
work with numbers larger than that, you have to use
floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only six or
seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can
perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000!
(the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times
... times 2 times 1). For example, this value for
1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums:
40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071
46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048
00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669
94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950
59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910
56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476
63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241
74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791
43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534
52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155
86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785
89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151
02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126
48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215
66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975
60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535
34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394
50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200
01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317
81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760
88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780
88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403
12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565
81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786
90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614
39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665
26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348
34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946
59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272
24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657
24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756
55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623
77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446
64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179
97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459
01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819
37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013
74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233
44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278
28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355
42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988
25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994
87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018
21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636
77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230
56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577
79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000.
Node:bigot, Next:bit, Previous:bignum, Up:= B
=
bigot n.
[common] A person who is religiously attached to a particular
computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see
religious issues).
Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', `ITS bigot',
`APL bigot', `VMS bigot', `Berkeley bigot'. Real bigots can be
distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that
they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time
and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It
is truly said "You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him
much." Compare weenie, Amiga Persecution
Complex.
Node:bit, Next:bit bang, Previous:bigot, Up:= B
=
bit n.
[from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT'] 1.
[techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information
obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two
outcomes are equally probable. 2. [techspeak] A computational
quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and
false or 0 and 1. 3. A mental flag: a reminder that something
should be done eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't
seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you
something.) 4. More generally, a (possibly incorrect) mental
state of belief. "I have a bit set that says that you were the
last guy to hack on EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last
guy to hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on
this, so please stop me if this isn't true.")
"I just need one bit from you" is a polite way of indicating
that you intend only a short interruption for a question that can
presumably be answered yes or no.
A bit is said to be `set' if its value is true or 1, and
`reset' or `clear' if its value is false or 0. One speaks of
setting and clearing bits. To toggle
or `invert' a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1
to 0. See also flag, trit, mode
bit.
The term `bit' first appeared in print in the computer-science
sense in a 1948 paper by information theorist Claude Shannon, and
was there credited to the early computer scientist John Tukey
(who also seems to have coined the term `software'). Tukey
records that `bit' evolved over a lunch table as a handier
alternative to `bigit' or `binit', at a conference in the winter
of 1943-44.
Node:bit bang, Next:bit bashing, Previous:bit, Up:= B
=
bit bang n.
Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by
rapidly tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the
appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT
and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more
interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at the same
time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the wannabees.
Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers,
presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80
micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO. In an interesting instance of
the cycle of
reincarnation, this technique returned to use in the
early 1990s on some RISC architectures because it consumes such
an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes
sense not to have a UART. Compare cycle of reincarnation.
Node:bit bashing, Next:bit bucket, Previous:bit bang, Up:= B =
bit bashing n.
(alt. `bit diddling' or bit
twiddling) Term used to describe any of several kinds of
low-level programming characterized by manipulation of bit, flag, nybble, and other
smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include
low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and
error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics
programming (see bitblt), and
assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or
a real technical challenge (more usually the former). "The
command decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but
the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See
also bit bang, mode bit.
Node:bit bucket, Next:bit decay, Previous:bit bashing, Up:= B =
bit bucket n.
[very common] 1. The universal data sink (originally, the
mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end
of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or
destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit bucket'. On Unix, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as `the
Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail
and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed
according to Finagle's Law;
important mail is much more likely to end up in the bit bucket
than junk mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting
delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed
by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of
the network. 3. The ideal location for all unwanted mail
responses: "Flames about this article to the bit bucket." Such a
request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4.
Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those
figures last week; they must have landed in the bit bucket."
Compare black hole.
This term is used purely in jest. It is based on the fanciful
notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only
misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier
term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time
hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the
CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of
the bit box'. See also chad
box.
Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence
of the `parity preservation law', the number of 1 bits that go to
the bit bucket must equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance
results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer
technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled
maintenance.
Node:bit decay, Next:bit rot, Previous:bit bucket, Up:= B =
bit decay n.
See bit rot. People with a
physics background tend to prefer this variant for the analogy
with particle decay. See also computron, quantum bogodynamics.
Node:bit rot, Next:bit twiddling, Previous:bit decay, Up:= B =
bit rot n.
[common] Also bit decay.
Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from
the observation that unused programs or features will often stop
working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has
changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were
radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code
in a program will become increasingly garbled.
There actually are physical processes that produce such
effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclides in
ceramic chip packages, for example, can change the contents of a
computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media
failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite
rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to
compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers that
cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a
myth; see the cosmic rays
entry for details.
The term software rot is
almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the
notional cause.
Node:bit twiddling, Next:bit-paired keyboard,
Previous:bit rot, Up:= B =
bit twiddling n.
[very common] 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which incredible amounts of time
and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often
with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible. 2.
Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless
goal. 3. Approx. syn. for bit
bashing; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device
control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to
a known state.
Node:bit-paired keyboard,
Next:bitblt, Previous:bit twiddling, Up:= B =
bit-paired keyboard n.,obs.
(alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout
that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and
remained common for several years on early computer equipment.
The ASR-33 was a mechanical device (see EOU), so the only way to generate the character
codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of
the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could
be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was
pressed. In order to avoid making the thing even more of a kluge
than it already was
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