#======= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 3.3.1, 25 JAN 1996 =======#
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 3.3.1" or "The
on-line hacker Jargon File, version 3.3.1, 25 JAN 1996".)
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 esr@snark.thyrsus.com (215)-296-5718
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:
**************
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.
Hackish 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 entries.
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, {Hacker Folklore}. The `outside' reader's attention is
particularly directed to Appendix B, {A Portrait of J. Random Hacker}.
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.
: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 hackish 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 hackish 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.
: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, {FTP}ed 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 hackish 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 {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 2.9.8, 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 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.
: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 anthromorphization. Each is discussed
below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.
Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthromorphization,
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:
---------------
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
: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
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
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.
: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]
: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.
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 `Unixen' and `Twenexen'
are never used; 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.
: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 (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!"
:Anthromorphization:
--------------------
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish
tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. This 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'. What *is* common is 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'.
: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.
: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.
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). 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 , , ,
, , , . 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 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...". This comes
from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print
representation for a backspace. It 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 is fading as more mailers get good editing
capabilities, but one occasionally still sees things like this:
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. 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 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
--
== 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:
The flame goes here.
You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:
This is an extremely hot flame.
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.
:Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions:
========================================
One area where hackish 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 the notation 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.
In 1991 practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct'
inclusion style occasionally lead to {holy wars}. One variant
style reported uses the citation character `|' in place of `>' for
extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being
retained. 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).
: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 seems to be
asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits 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' or German `doch' with which one could
unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question.
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!").
: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 `scorerre' and
`cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been seen
conjugated in Swedish. 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.
From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from
Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a
stratum of `pirate boards' inhabited by {cracker}s, phone phreaks, and
{warez d00dz}. These people (mostly teenagers running 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").
* 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. For further discussion of the pirate-board
subculture, see {lamer}, {elite}, {leech}, {poser}, {cracker}, and
especially {warez d00dz}.
: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:
1. 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).
2. 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).
3. 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.
4. 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/)
A /*/ 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 consonents 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'!)
: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.
Prefix ** 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
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 Syst`eme 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.
:Format For New Entries:
========================
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.
Try to conform to the format already being used in the ASCII on-line version
--- head-words separated from text by a colon (double colon for topic
entries), cross-references in curly brackets (doubled for topic
entries), pronunciations in slashes, etymologies in square brackets,
single-space after definition numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to
the standard ASCII character set (7-bit printable, no high-half
characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of the versions
generated from the master file is an info document that has to be
viewable on a character tty.
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.
There is now an HTML version of the File available at
//www.ccil.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
FTP over Internet, and will include a version number. Read it, pass
it around, contribute -- this is *your* monument!
The Jargon Lexicon
******************
= A =
=====
:abbrev: /*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ n. Common abbreviation for
`abbreviation'.
:ABEND: /o'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. [ABnormal END] Abnormal
termination (of software); {crash}; {lossage}. Derives from
an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers but
seriously mainly by {code grinder}s. 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'.
:accumulator: n. 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}.)
:ACK: /ak/ interj. 1. [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".
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 2), i.e., "I'm not here").
:Acme: n. The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and
non-functional gadgetry -- where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson
shop. 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 violent and improbable ways.
:acolyte: n.,obs. [TMRC] An {OSU} privileged enough to
submit data and programs to a member of the {priesthood}.
: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 against
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}.
:Ada:: n. A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been 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 is "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.
:adger: /aj'r/ vt. [UCLA mutant of {nadger}] 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}.
: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}.
: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. Now better known as 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.
:AFAIK: // n. [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
: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
marked by customary observances on the hacker networks.
:AI: /A-I/ n. Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence',
so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken
among hackers.
: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 (1996) to solve them have
foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence'
they seem to require. See also {gedanken}.
: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 {AI Koans} in Appendix A). See also {ha ha
only serious}, {mu}, and {{Humor, Hacker}}.
:AIDS: /aydz/ n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*'
is a {glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple),
this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe
{SEX}. See {virus}, {worm}, {Trojan horse},
{virgin}.
:AIDX: n. /aydkz/ 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}, {Open DeathTrap},
{ScumOS}, {sun-stools}.
: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}.
: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.
: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}.
:alpha particles: n. See {bit rot}.
: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 `clover'
or `Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually reveals
that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also
{feature key}). Some Mac hackers, confusingly, reserve `alt'
for the Option key (and it is so labeled on some Mac II keyboards).
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). 3. 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".
:alt bit: /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See {meta
bit}.
:altmode: n. Syn. {alt} sense 3.
: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}}.
:amoeba: n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal
computer.
:amp off: vt. [Purdue] To run in {background}. From the
Unix shell `&' operator.
:amper: n. Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand
(`&', ASCII 0100110) character. See {{ASCII}} for other synonyms.
: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}}.
: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.
:annoybot: /*-noy-bot/ n. [IRC] See {robot}.
:ANSI: n. /an'see/ 1. n. [techspeak] The American National
Standards Institue. ANSI, along with the International Standards
Organization (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.
:AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay-os/ (West Coast) vt.,obs.
To increase the amount of something. "AOS the campfire."
[based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] Usage:
considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by
{bump}. See {SOS}. 2. n. A {{Multics}}-derived OS
supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced
/A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system
administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS
System") was created, issued a part number, and circulated as
photocopy folklore; it was called "How to Goad and Levitate
your CHAOS System". 3. n. Algebraic Operating System, in reference
to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse
Polish) notation. 4. A {BSD}-like operating system for the IBM
RT.
Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a {PDP-10}
instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added
1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask,
does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah,
here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such
instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction
if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if
the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped
if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always;
and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never
skipped.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even
more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the
next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant
`do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers
never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the {JRST}
(Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster
and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of
assembler programming.
: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.) Oppose {tool}, {operating system}.
:arena: [Unix] n. 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}.
: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}.
:ARMM: n. [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal
Moderation'] A Usenet robot 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, the};
{sorcerer's apprentice mode}. See also {software laser},
{network meltdown}.
:armor-plated: n. Syn. for {bulletproof}.
:asbestos: adj. Used as a modifier to anything intended to
protect one from {flame}s; also in other highly
{flame}-suggestive usages. See, for example, {asbestos
longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}.
: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.
: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.
:ASCII:: /as'kee/ n. [acronym: American Standard Code for
Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of
present-day computers. The modern version uses 7 bits for each
character, whereas most earlier codes (including an early version
of ASCII) 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.
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; .
Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier.
"
Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark;
double-glitch; ; ; dirk;
[rabbit-ears]; double prime.
#
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp;
{crunch}; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe;
flash; , pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud;
thump; {splat}.
$
Common: dollar; . Rare: currency symbol; buck;
cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of
ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money].
%
Common: percent; ; mod; grapes. Rare:
[double-oh-seven].
&
Common: ; amper; and. 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; . Rare: prime;
glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark]; ; .
( )
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;
; o/c round bracket, l/r round
bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
*
Common: star; [{splat}]; . Rare: wildcard; gear;
dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see
{glob}); {Nathan Hale}.
+
Common: ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].
,
Common: . Rare: ; [tail].
-
Common: dash; ; . Rare: [worm]; option; dak;
bithorpe.
.
Common: dot; point; ; . Rare: radix
point; full stop; [spot].
/
Common: slash; stroke; ; forward slash. Rare:
diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
:
Common: . Rare: dots; [two-spot].
;
Common: ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid],
pit-thwong.
< >
Common: ; 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); [angle/right angle].
=
Common: ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe;
[half-mesh].
?
Common: query; ; {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;
.
V
Rare: [book].
[ ]
Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; ; bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U
turn/U turn back].
\
Common: backslash; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash;
slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash; ;
reversed virgule; [backslat].
^
Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; . Rare:
chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of');
fang; pointer (in Pascal).
_
Common: ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare:
score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
`
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open
quote; ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark];
unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push;
; quasiquote.
{ }
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; . Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit;
l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
|
Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare:
; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from
UNIX); [spike].
~
Common: ; 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.
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 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.
: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
Figure 1.
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__/--- \\
\_\ /_/
Figure 2.
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 "
Figure 3.
Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are
reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more:
(__) (__) (__)
(\/) ($$) (**)
/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Figure 4.
There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii.art, devoted to this
genre; however, see also {warlording}.
: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.
: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.).
: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-}.
:autobogotiphobia: /aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See
{bogotify}.
: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."
:avatar: n. Syn. 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
sumetimes used on {MUD}s. 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 disliked the term
`superuser', and was propagated through an ex-CMU hacker at
Tektronix.
: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)'.
= B =
=====
:back door: n. 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 suggested the
possibility 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. 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'.
: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. The cabal {mailing list}
disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight.
:backbone site: n. 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. --ESR]
:backgammon:: See {bignum} (sense 3), {moby} (sense 4),
and {pseudoprime}.
:background: n.,adj.,vt. 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.
:backspace and overstrike: interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to
suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common
among APL programmers.
: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}.
: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}.
:Bad Thing: n. [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.
:bag on the side: n. 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."
: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 the scrotum, but in their current usage they
have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's {lexiphage} program is the first and to date only known
example of a program *intended* to be a bagbiter.
: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}).
: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.
: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.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.")
: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.
: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.
:bandwidth: n. 1. 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}. 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.
: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.
: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.
:bang path: n. 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}},
{network, the}, and {sitename}.
: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.
:bar: /bar/ n. 1. 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}.
:bare metal: n. 1. 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, a Real Programmer} (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.
:barf: /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']
1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish
equivalent of the Val\-speak "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