Introduction to TIHI Computer Contradictionary

"PubUsb v. In literary affairs, to become the fundamental element in a cone of

critics."-Ambrose Bierce.

"Ten it not on the !lidewalb of New York~nuhli!lh it not in the Avenue.'lof

the Americas ... " (2 Samuel 1:20, SKBRV)

Thirteen years and untold computer "generations" have passed since my

DDPD (The Devil's DP Dictionary [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981]) was first
exposed to conical, nay, hyperbolic dissection. Malgre tout, the book survived
"in print" for over ten years and, I believe, fulfilled its original satirical aim of
"increasing the dearth of useful data processing glossaries."
The ould DDPD eventually achieved its predestined epuisage, but at least
it remained unremaindered to the bitter end, sparing me the authors' ultimate
indignity: snapping up job lots at tuppence a gross.
Since its demise, I have been occasionally reminded, especially by readers
of my UNIX Review "Devil's Advocate" column, that a new DDPD is long
overdue, exploiting both the catastrophic decline of our fair trade (''the laxi-
con was never laxer") and the steady increase in my omniscience since 1981.
After much coaxing and ridicule, therefore, I now offer this update under
a fresh title and a more fertile imprimatur. My initial working title was the
gender-free Child of Devil's DP Dictionary until an informal poll revealed
that DP was no longer associated with computing. Those interviewed sug-
gested "displaced person" (56%), "double play" (33%), "deferred payment"
(7%), "directione propria" (5%), and "data processing" (-1%). Clearly, the
locus of computing has moved from the manipulation of information to the
painting of icons and the tracking of mouse balls.
The new title tips mon vieux chapeau to Georges Elgozy (Le
Contradictionnaire [Paris: Editions Denrel, 1967]), yet another underappre-
ciated cynical lexicographer. In addition to taking the obvious interpretation
of Elgozy's portmanteau, you are invited to consider the transition from bas-
soon to contrabassoon.
Introduction to 7JIe Computer Contrlldlt:llonMy

I have added over SOOnew headwords, doubling the original target domain,
but need to stress that wit resists a uniform distribution. Dip away until, if
ever, an entry tickles your fancy. Ignore or forgive the rest.

xii
Introduction to the First Edition

This book is aimed at the dearth of useful data processing glossaries. It may
well increase this dearth, but nevertheless I hope that it casts an amusing glare
on the many linguistic opacities which bedevil the computing trade.
Ambrose Bierce (l842-1914?), the underappreciated inventor of cynical
lexicography, defined the dictionary as "a malevolent device for cramping the
growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic:'· Whether we like it or
not, language has never paid the slightest attention to such crampage-not
once since that almighty cock-up at Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)-nor to the
countless Academic-type crusades mounted to enforce goodspeak and proper
usage. Indeed, the dictionary has recently been blamed for endorsing "shan-
ty-town constructions" and lending authority to "how a sufficiently large
number of half-literate immigrants talk."2
The computer revolution is still "too much with us" to justify a dogmatic
"naming of parts"--or even a positive taxonomical posture-but we can learn
from similar crises in the history of science. Linnaeus (1735) and Lavoisier
(1787), for example, were faced with the problem of assigning new names to
new and old objects (organisms and chemicals, respectively); their choice of
"neutral" roots from the "dead" Latin and Greek established a trend followed
by most scientific disciplines. The precision of the new appellations compared
with the vernacular (e.g., not all cats are Felix domesticus, and there are salts
other than sodium chloride) has had the negative side effect of alienating the
nonscientist.
The DP vocabulary is still very much based on Anglo-Saxon roots, reflect-
ing the informality of the English-American pioneers, and underlining the fact
that computer science is not yet ready for Linnaean classifications.

I. Bierce's aphorisms. masquerading as definitions, first appeared in various California newspa-

per and magazine columns between 1881 and 1906. They were collated and issued "in covers" as
the Cynic's Wont Book (1906). A more complete edition emerged in 1911 as The Devil's
Dictionary (New York: Neale Publishing Company). Bierce avoided the horrors of a convention-
al demise by disappearing in Mexico during the 1913-1914 revolution.
2. Lancelot Hogben, The Vocabulary of Science (London: Heinemann, 1969).
introduction to the FlI'8t Edition

In the meantime, we survive merrily with our anthropomorphic memory,

our medical bug, our sexual random access, our homely address, our gastro-
nomic chip, our sportive jump, our ornithological nest, our narcotic hLlsh, our
thespian mask, our law's delay, our daily queue, and our slum's degradation.

Stan Kelly-Bootie
San Francisco, California, and Bargeman, Provence

xiv
Guide

Main entries (headwords), arranged in alphabetical order, are set in boldface

type.

The meaning of an entry should always be ascertained before consulting this

dictionary.

Parts of speech are shown in italics: n. (noun); v. (verb); v. intrans. (inb'anSi-

tive verb); v. trans. (b'anSitive verb); adj. (adjective); adv. (adverb); interj.
(interjection).

Pronunciations are indicated, rarely, between reversed virgules: \glass titty\

Etymologies are suggested between squarish brackets: [From Latin aboriri

''to miscarry."]

Cross-references (implicit and explicit) are signaled by the typographical

nuance of small-capitalletters.

Diatribes following the so-called definition are offset in a minuscule font-

beyond the reach of legal beagality.
A
AA See AUTO-ANTONYM.

abacus n. [From Latin abacus "a back up."] A reliable solid-state biquinary
computing device now partly superseded by the Intel PENTIUM.
=>The venerable bead still has many champions, but most attempts to refine the tech-
nology have proved self-defeating, to say the least. The Irish Business Machines
megabead frame with gravity-assisted multisliding, for example, failed to catch on
even in the lucrative Russian point-of-sale market. Some blame the excessive minia-
turization adopted to provide 64 K beads per wire; others point to the bewildering array
of color schemes used to distinguish mantissa and exponent in the various floating-
bead sections. The original, time-honored abacus (see the illustration on p. 2), which
can be manipulated without tweezers and microscopes, survives as a useful standby for
the PC XT. ISO Maintenance Bulletin 2, covering the monthly greasing of cross wires,
should be strictly observed to achieve maximum bead rates. Looking ahead to the
inevitable disappearance of real abaci, we should mention that virtual substitutes are
being mooted. In the Macintosh version, you will be able to mouse-drag the beads
while a small window displays totals and error messages.

abbreviation n. The shortened form of a word or phrase. See also ACRONYM,

CUKTATION, IDENTIFIER.

=>Abbreviated phrases carry little weight in the DP LAXICON unless generated with
acronymic cuteness. Ironically, some abbreviations are syllabically longer than their
roots: the TV show "That Was The Week That Was" was vocally doubled to
TWTWfW until TW-cubed was coined. Worse fates attended the trisyllabic "When,
Where, Why" (a time-management package) and "World Wide Web" (an Internet
hypertext system) each of which moved to WWW (9 syllables) and thence to W-cubed
(4 syllables).

abend n. [From German gulen Abend "good evening."] A system ABORl'

deliberately induced (usually on Fridays) to allow the third-shift staff to leave
early.

ABM n. [Arab Business Machines.] A shadowy consortium rumored to be

poised for an mM takeover bid in the mid I960s.
=>Critics have claimed that ABM was a Zionist plot intended to flood the Arab world
with early versions of OS 360. Others believed that it was a genuine Arab attempt to
switch from oil to a more profitable enterprise. Yet others postulated that the Judeo-
Christian exploitation of the ALGORITHM, an Islamic invention (patents pending since
825 C.E.), had gone a little too far without proper dues. A rhymster of the period cap-
tured the excitement:
abort

:1
o.
o

i
L:Q~
t~-~
..:1
./
•...•...

Haroun al-Raschid (may his revenues increase)

Awoke one night from a dream of peace;
He called his guards with eastern phlegm
And said, "Go buy me mM!
Here's fifty billion on the nail;
IT there's any change, get me ICL!

A muezzin to call the compilers,

Mecca bureaux for service divine;
We'll remove the golf ball from the printers
And have UNIX protecting each line."

abort n. & v. trans. [From Latin aboiri ''to miscarry."] 1 n. The rather heavy
interruption of a process or system, usually self-induced, but sometimes
invoked by the user. See also ABEND. 2 v. trans. To conclude (a salesperson's
visitation) by producing a loaded firearm of sufficient caliber.
ACATA n. [Acronym for the Association for Computer-Assisted Text
Analysis.] An international organization working to establish an interuniver-
sity network of machine-readable corpora. This will, for example, allow
scholars in Canterbury to access the Chaucerian database at the University of

2
 Ad8

California at Berkeley, while researchers in 51. Louis are online to the T. S.

Eliot disk at Oxford University.

A rare example of acronymic graph theory.

Acce88™ n. [From Latin accedere "to come near."] The Microsoft DATABASE
named with an optimistic abandon not uncommon in the DP ONOMASTICON.
::::>Francophone cynics, having survived Ingres as a possible corruption of "ingress,"
tend to interpret acces as "I'arrivee ou Ie retour d'un phenomene pathologique."

accountant n. One engaged in the regular verification of assets = liabilities

+ (assets - liabilities) and similar identities.
ack n. [Origin: back-formed negation of NAK.] A signal indicating that the
error-detection circuits have failed.

acronym n. [Acronym for Alphabetic Collocation Reducing Or Numbing

Your Memory.] A memorable word from which a non-memorable phrase is
acrostically generated; a circumlocutory abbreviation often confused with its
antonym, MNEMONIC.
::::>Devising an acronym is the first step in systems design. Contrary to common belief,
most acronyms are really RETRONYMS, created by mapping initial letters onto words
rather than the reverse. The former mapping, is I-many and therefore easier. This also
explains the antimnemonicity of most acronyms. Many design teams manage without
a resident full-time acronymist. This is fatal penny-pinching and explains the current
low standards in DP acronymity.
David Harris has suggested an alternative self-acronym: Absurdly Contrived
Reduction of Nomenclature Yielding Mnemonic.

acuracy n. An absence of erors. "The computer offers both speed and acura-
cy, but the greatest of these is acuracy" (Anon. doctoral thesis on automation,
1980).

Ada n. [Named for Augusta Ada (Byron), Countess of Lovelace

(1815-1852), programming pioneer.] The DoD-sponsored language often

3
ADD

confused with ADA (American Dental Association; American Diabetes

Association; Americans for Democratic Action; and adenosine deaminase). In
particular, ADA deficiency is a severe immune system disorder not yet proved
to be related to the Ada language. See also BABBAGE.
=:>William A. Whitaker's "Ada-The Project" lecture at HOPL-II (ACM SIGPLAN
Notices 28, no. 3 [March 1993]) dispelled many of the Ada myths before a tradition-
ally dubious audience. Yes, the language is big, bloated, and Pascalian, but so are the
needs of U.S. military computing. The latter covers a range of hardware and software
in size, complexity, and legacity beyond normal secular commercial comprehension,
from Bawston Abba T-distributions in proto-Fortran to Gettysburg battle plans in pre-
JOVIAL. The new "common" language is already saving billions just in code mainte-
nance. Ada was, in fact, the first major high-order-Ianguage design project subjected
to open, international tender. The French won! The Russians were close runners-up
(only joking, Bill!) Further, "The language product was on time and within budget, and
of very high quality" (ibid., p. 327). The biggest lie about Ada calls it "a language
designed by a committee." The b1Ith is that the procurement committee and the win-
ning design team were each dominated by a single person.

ADD n. [Acronym for Attention DeficitlDeficiency Disorder.] 1 Children An

affiiction that is best treated with a sudden blow to the head or by a prolonged
matrix of indepth psychocognitive evaluations depending on the sociodemo-
graphics of the parents. 2 Computers An affiiction that is best treated by push-
ing in the boards or replacing the chips depending on the current service
contract. Compare DYSLEXIA.

ad hoc adj. [Of a STANDARD] established for a particular purpose, namely,

after suitable bullying, to become de facto and, after further bullying, de jure.

adjective n. (esp. DP usage) any noun. See also NOUNS, MARCH OF.

=:>Jacques Barzun in "An Essay on French Verse," notes the "vive la difference"
between English and French grammatical attitudes. The English "say toothbrush and
a
driving license; French must have brosse dents and permis de conduire."

adjectival chain n. (OP usage) any sequence of nouns used cumulatively to

modify the terminator, "system." As in: Front End Object SQL Link Run Time
Database Management C++ Class Library System.
=:>Young, budding writers who employ tired, two-adjective modifiers in their first,
rejected novels before taking on potboiling, technical assignments must learn to adjust
their antiquated, predicational METIfODOLOGY.

ad ROMlnem adj. Relating to a personal attack on your BIOS.

aerosol spray n. A container holding a pressurized panacea that can be

released in a series of unskilled squirts. See the table on pp. 5-6.

4
 aerosol _prey

Table of EITOSOI IDe. TN Aerosol Sprays

Trade Name Function Mode d'Emploi
Smegma Emits cheap, stale, Before quitting prematurely,
personalized tobacco fumes, old spray the computer room or data
coffee aromas, and the smell of prep area for 30 seconds.
busy peripherals Smegma persists for at least 8
hours, reassuring the next shift
arrivals that they have just
missed you
Writ-guard Antilitigant. Repels 99% of aU Spray lightly and evenly over all
known attorneys, high court write, subpoenas, juries, Das,
judges, monopolies, commis- exhibits, and sub-judice soft-
sions, federal consumer protec- ware. Caution: Avoid the inno-
tion agencies, more cent or guilty, whichever the
case may be
Thesis Imparts a scholarly gloSs to your Apply liberally to your ms and
doctoral susmission; adds don- assessors. Double-spray the first
nish wit and waspish innuendo and last pages and all footnotes
and references
Compat An effective general conversion Hold spray 3 inches from your
aid. Gives instant compatibility target tape, card, compiler,
with alien systems, both hard- DBMS, DPM, or Cpu. Squirt
ware and software. used and and rotate to ensure an even cov-
recommended by both SHA ering of all bits, links, code holes,
members and subschemas. Caution: Do not
spray the source environment
Walpurge The sure-fire file and dataha.<;e Save hours cleaning those old
purging and initiation remedy! files! One quick squelch nullifies
Tried and tested with all media: all but patterns (overflow areas,
ROM, PROM, EPROM (beats too!). For ivory abacus beads, a
the most ultra UV!), core, second application may be need-
rnag'n'paper tape, bard'n'soft ed. Caution: Do not inhale! Your
disks, paper'n'mag cards, bub- cellular DNA code may disap-
bles, mercury delay lines, pear
William's tubes, Brunsvigas,
more

Launch Ensures a smooth new model Spray with abandon on your PR

release. Impacts the market, not department, brochures, existing
your old range! user base, and Press Day sand-
wiches

5
Shoo-bug Instantly fixes all detectable Treat your suspect code before
BUOS!Soothes the undetectables! and after compilation. If the
Ends your endless loops, sup- condition persists, treat the com-
plies missing declarations. takes piler. Very high-level languages
pounds off your flabby syntax may require repeated applica-
while you sleep! Guaranteed tions. Will not harm or stain
effective, all languages, all lev- error-free modules. Use only as
els! Why wait for that new com- directed
piler release? Save $$$$ NOW!
Prof. Knuth writes: "My secret is
no more. Thanks to Shoo-bug,
the era of the People's Algorithm
has dawned."
New Improved Incredibly, the omnipotent, infal- Spray freely, as before. But now
Shoo-bug lible Shoo-bug plus the added, Shoo-bug works on your OS
secret ingredient FOOl and on all documentation.
Caution: Keep away from
domestic animals and AI depart-
ments
Prop-Rite Protects your software instantly.
Prevents unauthorized copying Apply sparingly to disks, tapes,
of source or object code, whatev- and listings. Protection lasts 12
er the medium hours. Will not harm the most
delicate programs
Steal 'The essential spray for timeshare
freaks and software thieves. Will .For the best results, spray the
break down the tightest security target system. If this is not p0s-
barriers. Converts all passwords sible, spray the terminal and
to FOOBARI and all files to modem. Prop-Rited systems
public! Even overcomes Prop- may need several applications to
Rite. Used by Control and Chaos remove protection
agents the world over

affordable adj. Marketing weaselese meaning "It's never been easier to

raise a second mortgage."
::::>Bewareof computer adverts listing the price as $CALL which equals $404,149 in
TIJRING'S base-32 notation. Likewise, ignore such specious enticements as "Limit 2 per
family," and "No dealers, please." Compare "Price n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for
the wear and tear of conscience in demanding it" (Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary).

AI n. 1 A cry of pain. 2 A three-toed, trumpet-tree-chewing

sloth that squeals
when disturbed. 3 Overloaded abbrev. Artificial Insemination; AImFICIAL
INTElLIGENCE; Amnesty International. Warning Often resists contextual dis-
ambiguation.

6
 slgorasm

AI, atrong n. AI funded by the Department of Defense. Compare AI, WEAK.

~Professor R. Schank writes: "My work has required a significant amount of finan-
cial support, which has come for the main part from the U.S. givemment [sic], specif-
ically the Department of Defence. When one mentions the DoD in a research funding
context, there is the usual groan of how scientists are helping make more weapons and
such. In fact, the DoD, through the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of
Naval Research, and more recently, the Air Force, have been some of the most enlight-
ened supporters of real scientific research in this country. I thank the people who have
made those agencies as sensible and significant as they are. I also thank the National
Science Foundation for its support over the years" (The Cognitive Computer, Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984).
Non-machine translation: "Keep them funds a-rolling."
A strong AI supporter is one who would drag John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus into
a dark alley and beat the shit out of them. A strong AI opponent is one who refuses to
buy any product with the words 'Thinking," "Smart," "Expert," "Knowledge," or
"Intelligent" in or near it or its vendor's name.

AI, weak n. AI funded by the private sector. Compare AI, STRONG.

albohphobla n. The fear of palindromes.

~Sufferers who wish to succeed in the DP field should bend over backward to over-
come this disability. It is not unknown for some stacks to push in when they should
have popped out, and vice versa. It is, therefore, sound programming strategy to ensure
that all strings and sgnirts are made palindromic, and therefore immune from any triv-
ial reversal-type transformations.
A DP doctor writes: "Aibohphobia can be cured with a little cooperation from the
patient. Those with mild attacks, characterized by a brief, passing irritation with palin-
dromes, are usually taken through a gentle verbal therapy. I get them to repeat such
phrases as 'Madam, I am Fred,' 'Able was I ere I saw Josephine,' and 'A man, a plan,
a canal, Suez!' In more severe cases, for example, with patients who shake uncontrol-
lably at the sight of a radar, I often perform a rather pretty little hippocampectomy."
Don Hocy's enormous, computer-generated palindrome (based on a Jim Saxe tem-
plate) can be examined in Expert C Programming, Peter van der Linden, SunSoft
Press, Prentice-Hall, 1994. It starts "A man, a plan, a caret, a ban, a myriad, ...•• and
ends a page or two later with " ... a dairyman, a bater, a canal-Panama."

ALGOL 84 n. [Acronym for ALGOrithmic Language 84.] An extension of

ALOGOL being formulated by 84 dissidents from various user groups. The
original target date of 1984 has been advanced to 2084 to avoid renaming the
language.

algoraam n. [Origin: blend of algorism + orgasm.] A sudden, short-lived

moment of pleasure enjoyed by the programmer (and, for all we know, by the
system) when the final KLUDGE rings the bell.

7
algorlam

~A DP psychiatrist writes: "However brief the thrill, and however many disillusions
lie ahead, one's first algorasm is long remembered and savored. Many programmers,
alas, in spite of years spent sweating over a hot terminal, have never attained this sum-
mit. Perhaps they try too hard. Learning to relax while the system recompiles succes-
sive VERSIONS is a good habit to acquire. And then one day, after a series of A.EEPS,
when least expected, the magic 'No detected errors' message will fill your screen. In
their classic, The Algorasm Dissected: A Prolonged Study of Person-Machine
Intercourse in the Climactic Environment, Masters and Thumps have described a vari-
ety of algorasmic step functions, the many different tumescent plateaus possible before
the final, massive tintinnabulation, or the 'real McCoy' as we psychiatrists prefer to
call it. After the Holy Grail has come home to roost in the ballpark, expect a period of
deflation, or perhaps even self-doubt and guilt.
"Some of my patients, disregarding the mural caveats, light up a cigarette and ask
themselves, '0 God, do I really deserve so much happiness?' This is such a crazy atti-
tude I could scream. Relish that moment, I say, feel good and comfortable, even though
the algorasm may signal a project completed and the need to seek employment else-
where! Fresh fields and postures new lie ahead. The frequency and intensity of your
algorasms will certainly improve with a change of system, and who knows, maybe a
coarser language and a less inhibiting development environment await you. A log of
your previous climaxes with date, place, language, OS, etc., can spice the weakest
resume, but keep the narrative crisp and objective. Your prospective employer cannot
be expected to wade through a forum of boastful confessionals: 'As I stroked the key-
board, I felt my patellae stiffening; yes, yes implored the screen, just one line more,
escape ... ' and similar hyperbole are unlikely to impress a bank seeking some RPG
fixes in the School Savings package. Simple entries such as '031l5/94:2:00A.M.; made
it with Win32; all the way; wow; three days to recover' are infinitely more effective.
"Patients often ask me what the normal algorasmic frequency is-a typically mis-
guided attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. If you are content to write and run
furtive FAcroRiAL N routines in FORTRAN, a meaningless masturbatory exercise,
there is, of course, no limit to your daily emission rate. Similarly, there are voyeurs and
kibitzers who achieve dauntingly high climactical averages by invading someone else's
interactive space. So there is, and I stress this regularly at $150 per stress, no conceiv-
able pattern of algorasmic activity or inactivity that can be in any way characterized as
abnormal. As DP involvement sinks downward into socioeconomic groups unaware of
the cost-effectiveness of psychiatry, our profession and fee scales will maintain their
traditional integrity. The humblest of personal computer owners will be treated no dif-
ferently from our major mainframe victims."

algorlsm n. A pre-LISP ALGORITHM devised by abu-la'far Mohammed ibn-

Musa al-Khuwanzmi (Persian mathematician fl. C.E. 825) who wrote the first
BASIC substring modifier in a vain attempt to shorten his name.
~There is much unexplored and spurious evidence that he cooperated with his poet-
mathematician friend Omar Khayyam in many other areas of anachronistic computer
science. Alas, the demon drink then (as now) clearly interrupted the study of stacks and
Boolean algebra.

8
 algorithm

For 'IS' and 'IS-NOr' though with Rule and Line,

And 'UP-and DOWN' by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom, I
Was never deep in anything but-Wine.
(Tetrasich #58, Rubdiydt. tr. E. Fitzgerald)

Omar's entire output reflects that poignant, calvinistic despair common to all pro-
grammers. Then (as now) progress was stultified by the lack of effective text-editing
facilities:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: Nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
(Tetrasich #76. Op. cit.)

algorithm n. [Origin: ALGORISM with a pronounced LISP.] A rare species

endangered by the industry's cavalier pursuit and gauche attempts at domes-
tication.
~ The current plight of the unspotted algorithm, Algorithmus accuratus, can be traced
back to overculling in the 1960s. It will be recalled that the previous decade had wit-
nessed an uncontrolled population growth, indeed a plague of the creatures in diverse
academic terrains. Their pernicious invasion of the commercial environment in the late
1950s prompted IBM to offer the controversial $4.98 bounty per pelt. Hordes of
greedy and unskilled people from all walks of life deserted their jobs and families, sold
their possessions, and flocked to dubious, fly-by-night programming schools.
Overarmed with high-level weapons, these roaming bands of bounty seekers hunted
down and massacred the poor algorithm around the clock. The inevitable reaction
occurred, but almost too late, in the form of an ecological "Save the Algorithm" lobby,
replete with badges, bumper stickers, and fund-raising algorithms. Public opinion was
aroused, in particular, by the future vice-preside nt's catchy campaign song:

Al Gore-ithm, Al Gore-ithm, Al Gore-ithm,

Who could ask for anything more?

The 19708 have brought some hope to the preservationists. Two reasonably hardy vari-
ants appear to have evolved, the Algorithmus pascalia and the Algorithmus heuristi-
cus, which in their different ways are proving more resistant to the grosser exploita-
tions of the unstructured. The new strains are partly the result of neo-Darwinian sur-
vival (the fitter code overcomes an antagonistic environment) and partly the outgrowth
of patient, prolonged interbreeding in areas protected by bagbiters, chompers, diddlers,
users, and other anathematic influences. Wirth and Knuth deserve praise in this con-
text. The hybrid A. seminumericalis, for example, gently nurtured by Prof. Donald
Knuth, can be spotted regularly cavorting on the sylvan campi of Stanford University,

9
ALLC

California. Its sweet, anthropomorphically cuddlesome disposition attracts weekend

crowds of panda proportions. The feeding signs state quite clearly that the hybrid will
not perfonn for peanuts; indeed. the A. seminumerica/is needs a substantial bunch of
greenery before it will embark on its dazzling repertoire of parlor tricks, delighting all
age groups and both cultures. Perhaps not all, for some killjoys liken these displays of
mock intelligence to the exploitation of circus animals or the chimpanzee tea party.
Also, there remains the fear that, however amusing and superficially sycophantic we
breed our algorithmic pets, they will prove to be feline, superior. inscrutable, and the
ultimate victor.

ALLC n. [Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.] An interna-

tional association founded by Prof. Roy Wisbey (King's College, London) and
Mrs. Joan Smith (Regional Computing Centre, University of Manchester) to
promote the use of SNOBOL.
~Literary computing is where you can drop names as well as digits.

alpha adj. (Of a VERSION) being the first (and invariably the best) of a series
expected to converge to a usable product.
~Owing, inter alia, to the sad decline in classical language skills, the series never pro-
gresses to the lohannine limit of perfection at omega. Indeed, versions beyond gamma
are rarely encountered since Marketing traditionally loses patience with QA and ships
the BETA.

ALU n. [Arthritic Logic Unit or (rare) Arithmetic Logic Unit.] A random-

number generator supplied as standard with all computer systems.

ambiguity n. 1 That which resists disambiguation. 2 [From Latin ambi "both

sides" + GUI.] The nagging uncertainty as to whether your application is run-
ning under Windows, Motif, PM, Open Desktop, or Open Look. See also
GRAND GUIGNOL.

~I proclaim the "pessimistic" rule for disambiguation. When the anti-viral package
says "These programs contain viruses," it is safer to assume "include" than "suppress."

ancillary adj. [From Latin ancilla "maid."] Preferred DP spelling: andl-

Uary. Essential.
~As with most gadgetary acquisitions, the primary purchase is designed to generate
a growing list of essential adjuncts. Familiar domestic examples include those shown
in the accompanying table.

10
 AND

18ble or AnclUarles
Primary purclwe ADclIIarieF
Mnvi~ camera Projector, screen, splicer, splicing
cement, projector stand, books of vari-
ous thicknesses to adjust projector
height, tolerant neighbors
VideoCam VCR, TV, tapes, Japlais-English dictio-
nary, offline rewinder, converters
toIfrom U.SJEuropean standards, toler-
ant neighbors
Fish tank Fish, water, heater, thermostat, ther-
mometer(s), pebbles, filter, charcoal,
antichlor, replacement fish, plants,
snails, lamps, more fish, fish food

The corresponding list for computers varies considerably according to type, size, and
application. The environmental ancillaries are still extensive for the larger main-
frames (air conditioning, false floors, tacky mats, standby generators, and so on),
whereas the newer breeds of mini- and microsystems can be plugged in like toasters
in the greasiest of kitchens. The set of ancillaries common to all DP installations
contains:
A 1lIINK SIGN

A warning sign such as the much-reproduced deterrent posted on the walls of

the London University A1LAS site in the 19608:

ACHTUNG!! ALLES LOOKENPEEPERS!!

Das computermaschine ist nich fllr gefingerpoken und mitten-grabben. 1st easy
schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
1st nich fllr gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen
hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watch das blinkeniichten.

A large receptacle for discarded printouts

Sticky Post-IfrM pads for recording passwords and vital operating instructions
Several Errosol mc.TN sprays
With the advent of the PC pricing wars, the list of ancillaries now includes keyboard,
monitor, RAM, and CPU. To disguise such deficiencies, machines are positively
advertised as keyboard-ready, monitor-ready, and so on.

AND v. trans. & adj. 1 v. trans. To conjunct (several binary victims) in the
Boolean environment. 2 adj. (Of a GATE) being able to and. Compare NAND;
NOR; OR.

11
ANSI

ANSI n. [Origin: Corruption of French ainsi, "thus," as in ainsi soit-i/ "so be

it," whence "ordained, obligatory." Now the presumed acronym for American
National Standards Institute.] One of many national and supranational bodies
devoted to establishing standards, i.e., dedicated to changing those rules that
have already been universally adopted. See also ASen; ffiM; ISO.

any key n. As in "Hit any key to continue ... "

~Having suffered the early, unforgiving precisions, newcomers are completely daz-
zled by their first "any key" command. Their fingers hover, frozen in suspicion and dis-
belief ...

aplphobla n. [From API, Applications Programming Interface + Greek pho-

bia.] The fear of being stung by a large collection of unrelated functions with
indistinguishable prototypes.
~JAX has pointed out that the Microsoft NT function modifier APIENTRY correctly
indicates the point where bugs swarm in through your window.

APL n. [A Programming Language.] Also called The Un-COBOL. A WORS

(Write-once, read seldom) language, devised by K. Iverson (1961), so com-
pacted that the source code can be freely disseminated without revealing the
programmer's intentions or jeopardizing proprietary rights. See also J.
~ There are three things a man must do
Before his life is done;
Write two lines in APL,
And make the buggers run.

Some linguists have noted similarities between APL and Basque. Both languages have
supporters low in number but fierce in loyalty, and both present incredible challenges
to the learner. Also, in spite of their limited distribution, both APL and Basque have
developed into many annoyingly incompatible dialects.
The APL cause has suffered several setbacks over the years. First, ffiM decided to
fill the gaps in the PC Extended ASCII character set with miscellaneous grinning
glyphs rather than provide the special APL characters. Next, two much heralded appli-
cations failed to convince a cynical world: the Soviet nuclear safety system and the
IBM's sales strategy suite, both written in APL.
The APL community's good-humored patience amid all these slings and arrows
seems to be paying off: APL is emerging as the ideal language for the rapid-prototyp-
ing of parallel-processing algorithms. The arrival of Unicode will also help solve the
APL character-set problem. To some, an added bonus is that APL has, so far, resisted
all attempts at object-orienteering.

app n. [Diminutive of "application."] The irrelevant 10 percent of your code

lurking beneath, and well-nigh inaccessible from, the glamorous, marketable
GUllayer. More at WINDOW, APPLET.

12
 archaism

~There is much to be said for the whole gooey, klic/cen und schieppen, mouse-ridden
maze of playful PULL-DOWNMENUS,undecipherable SPEEDBARS,ICONS,popup DIALOG
Boxes, and HYPERTEXTUaI HELPscreens. These can all be assembled effortlessly from
standard WIDGETsand serve to delay, indefinitely if possible, the user's confrontation
with profit-centered drudgery.

"The interface must compliment the system" (Sigsoft, SEN, April 1993). So let's try
msgbox(ftHello, pretty system-);

Apple n. A popular personal computer (made by Apple Computer Inc.,

Cupertino, California) with a refreshingly nonnumeric, non-acronymic apple-
ation.
~ I gave my love an Apple, that had no core;
I gave my love a platfonn, that had no floor;
I wrote my love a program, that had no end;
I gave my love an upgrade, with no cryin'.

How can there be an Apple, that has no core?

How can there be a platfonn, that has no floor?
How can there be a program, that has no end?
How can there be an upgrade, with no cryin'?

An apple's MOS memory don't use no core!

A platfonn that's perfect, it has no flaw!
A program with G<YI'Os, it has no end!
And I lied about the upgrade, with no cryin'!

See also MAC.

applet, applette n. [Diminutive of APP.] An empty, provably correct state-

ment immediately returning control to the calling GUI.

appliance computing n. The successful attempt to make your PC as USER-

FRIENDLY as your VCR.

architecture n. 1 The layout or structure of a hardware or software artifact,

carrying the spurious claim that prior planning was involved. 2 A useful
phrase terminator esp. when SYSTEM alone fails to provide an attractive line
justification or page layout. as in "Scalable Client/Server Distributed
Multidatabase System Architecture." 3 v. trans. To design up to the highest
billing standards possible.
~Pace John Barry and other critics of current jargon, the verbal fonn has an impec-
cable heritage, including such babblers as John Keats ("This was architectur'd thus By
the great Oceanus").

archaism n. A word or phrase inadvertently pointing back to an earlier, inap-

propriate technology. More at HANGUP; BEL; CR; CORE; LEADING.

13
argument

:::>Young MacUsers are often puzzled by the ICONS for disk files and directories since
they have never seen manilla folders or Victorian filing cabinets.

argument n. [diminutive arg.] A disputatious variable given to wrestling

with fractious FUNCflONS. See also CALL.
:::>Itis surely time to recover the original sense of "argument" (via Latin arguere, to
put in a clear light) as "clarification, proof." The depressing confusion over name/value
calling, between reaVformal arguments and/or parameters, and how/when/where they
are initialized and/or assigned must be resolved here and now. Remember: if you pass
by name, the function can corrupt your actual argument, but if you pass by value, the
function can only corrupt a copy of your argument. Some sophisticated languages let
you pass explicit pointers, pointers-to-pointers, references, references-to-pointers,
pointers-to-references, and so on to any depth (whence the phrase "beyond fath-
omage"), allowing the function to corrupt not only your arguments and their copies,
but also those of your erstwhile friends running in distant parts of the system. It's your
call, as they say.

ARM n. Acronym for The Annotated C++ Reference Manual, Margaret A.

Ellis and Bjarne Stroustrup, Addison-Wesley, 1990. The ANSI c++ base [sic]
document, more perused and exegeted than John 1:1.
:::>Overloaded: Adjustable Rate Mortgage, Master of Architecture, Armenian,
Armorican, escutcheon, and weapon. Warning Often resists contextual disambigua-
tion.

armadillo n. [Portmanteau: ARM + "peccadillo."] A piquant error in the ANSI

c++ specifications.

ARPA n. [Acronym for Advanced Research Projects Agency.] An agency of

the U.S. Department of Defense established in 1968 to test its defenses against
misuse and piracy in the large-scale distributed processing environment.
:::>Currently,more than 10,000 disparate host computers at government, academic, and
commercial sites are linked acronymically into the worldwide INTERNET (formerly
ARPANET and later DARPANET). The results of the experiment are somewhat
obscured by the fact that a few nodes slavishly observe protocol, while others have not
yet learned how to pirate.

artificial Intelligence n. abbrev. AI 1The area researched by the artificial

intelligentsia (attributed to Christopher Strachey [191~1975]) 2 The mis-
guided search for a lower-unit-cost Homo sapiens at a time when a majority
of the species remains critically underexploited [unemployed]. 3 The con-
struction of algorithms for the blackleg assembly of wooden building-block
motor cars. See also AI, STRONG; AI, WEAK; SHRDLU.
:::>Oneemerging truth from the ups and downs of AI is that AI researchers and their
machines seem equally incapable of learning.

14
 The Bible has the first and last word: "See, I have given into thy hand the king of
AI And there was not a man left in AI ... And Joshua burnt AI and made it a heap for
ever and the king of AI he hanged on a tree until eventide" (Joshua 8:1-28). "Howl,
o Heshbon, for AI is spoiled ... " (Jeremiah 49:3) [Ruler James Version]).

88 18 adv. & adj. (Of or as a) sleazy disclaimer formerly confined to pre-

abused-car salespersons, now mandatory in all hardware and software legal
preambles.
~But before we semanticize, let's morphologize. Consider the amusing CONST of "as
is" with respect to tense, number, and mood: "The vehicle was sold as is," "The man
pages come as is," "Chicago will be released as is," and so on.
The "as is" idiom carries, how can I say this without offending Chuck at the Name-
Your-Deal Motorama (Se Habla Tagalog, Bad Credit OK), a distinctly damaged-
goods, caveat unusquisque resonance. You might, however, view "as is" as Chuck's
only honest predicate in his traditional flood of misrepresentation, an essential but
reluctant footnote to dilute the local Lemon Law. Even so, it's sad to see this seedy dis-
claimer shamelessly pushed by the most uprighteous of DP vendors.
Thus ffiM and other fine suppliers regularly submit their hard-, soft- and be-wares,
including the so-called supporting documentation, not just "as is" but "strictly as is."
How "as is" can you get? Further, these escape clauses are no longer rendered in the
traditional, legalistic "small print." Rather, ALL CAPS are defiantly spouted as in the
Ziff Computer Select preamble, kindly forwarded by Ted Jerome via
TJJerome@tallysys.com:

EXCEPT AS SPECIFICALLY PROVIDED ABOVE, THE ISSUE AND DOC-

UMENTATION ARE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY
OF ANY KIND. ZIFF AND THE THIRD PARTY SUPPLIERS MAKE NO
WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
WITH RESPECT TO THE ISSUE, THE SUBSCRIPTION, THE PRODUCT
OR THE DOCUMENTATION, INCLUDING, BUT Nor LIMITED TO,
THEIR QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, MERCHANTABILITY, OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND ASSUME NO RESPONSffiILITY
FOR THE ACCURACY OR APPLICATION OF OR ERRORS OR OMIS-
SIONS IN ANY DATA OR SOFTWARE CONTAINED IN THE ISSUE OR
DOCUMENTATION. FURTHER, NEITHER ZIFF OR ANY OF THE THIRD
PARTY SUPPLIERS WARRANTS, GUARANTEES, OR MAKES ANY REP-
RESENTATIONS REGARDING THE USE, OR THE RESULTS OF THE
USE, OF THE ISSUE OR THE DOCUMENTATION IN TERMS OF COR-
RECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, CURRENTNESS OR OTHER-
WISE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE RESULTS AND PERFORMANCE
OF THE ISSUE OR SOFTWARE IS ASSUMED BY YOU AND SUCH ARE
PRICED ACCORDINGLY ...

How can marketing and masochistic self-effacement be so majestically entwined?

Prof. Michael Godfrey (ISL, Stanford) points out (private communication until
now) that the people who say "as is" are inveterate, Cretan-type liars, which gets us
ASCII

into Deep Smullyan Country. We need to ask if an "as is" statement is a claimer, dis-
claimer, neither, or both, and whether an "as is" statement should itself be treated "as
is," or its presumed negation, "as isn't." But at this lowest level of philosophical, cop-
ulative altercation, it is hard to envision a "meaningful anything" that is other than "as
is." When I raised these points with Chuck while haggling over a PorschelMercedes
trade, he referred me to Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of being-toward-
death, the mysteries of Dasein and Ek-sistenz, and the essential finitude of the $JDm
exchange rate. The conclusion was that his manager would meet me halfway.

ASCII n. [Acronym for American Standard Code for Information

Interchange? Possibly from English Comedian Arthur Askey.] A 7- or 8-bit
code forced upon the free world by vicious anti-ffiM rebels, led by the U.S.
Government, who held 16 card-carrying EBCDIC hostages at gunpoint in a
Washington committee compound for two years.
~The ASCII code, now with us like death and taxes, provides lexicographers with
much-needed diversion and fun in order that "abacus," for example, can be made to
precede "ZETA" in their tabulations. Some of the descriptive tokens assigned to each
ASCII code help preserve quaint archaisms: See BEL; CR.

ASL n. [American Sign Language.] A formal system of body signs for use in
the non-verbal, interpersonal communications environment.
~The DP industry offers many new employment opportunities for the disabled;
indeed, computing has forced a fundamental re-examination of the traditional criteria
for job discrimination on the basis of facultative impediments. Applicants with, say,
chronic logismus or persistent numeriosis have always been welcomed, but we are now
seeing fresh openings for those with deficiencies in the audioglottaI departments. Total
deafmutes, in fact, have consistently achieved top marks in the Sperry Univac "Shut-
up-and-Listen" test. Recent ASCII extensions to ASL (see the illustrations on pp. 18
and 19) offer a graceful nonlinear fluency to all who are deafened by DP noise (see
CRASH), or numbed by the semantic vacuity of a typical computer listing.

assembler n. A program that converts ASSEMBLY language statements into

machine code.
~The confusion between "assembler" and "assembly" is beyond undoing in the laxi-
con.

assembly adj. (Of a language) DP's first mollycoddling disaster whereby

the simple, unambiguous bit patterns of the CPU's instruction set were grant-
ed alphanumeric MNEMONICS. And this was done that the run-time errors be as
prophesied: "But his sons shall be stirred up, and shall Assemble a multitude
of great forces; and one shall certainly come, and overflow, and pass through;
then shall he return ...•• Dan 11:10.

16
 auto-antonym

assertion n. 1 A non-deductive proof, beyond refutation unless the assertor

is physically weaker than the assertee.
~It is unlikely that AI will ever be able to cope with Aristotle's eristie mode of argu-
ment, where, as opposed to rational truth-seeking, the goal is simply victory in dis-
putation.

ATM n. Overloaded abbrev. Automatic Teller Machine, Asynchronous

Transfer Model, Adobe lYpe Manager. Warning Often resists contextual dis-
ambiguation. As in "The ATM on each ATM in our bank's ATM network can
now print your transaction in microGothic italics."

AUGRATIN n. [Acronym for Amalgamated Union of General Rewriters,

Amenders, Tinkerers, and INterpolators.] See PAYROLL.

auto-antonym n. Also called self-antonym, antilogy. A word or phrase that

carries two contrary meanings. More at REGULAR; BROWSE.
~Jack Train is the doyen collector of these NatLang quiddities, for which he resur-
rected the word "anti logy." However, Galenus (2 C.B.) used "antilogy" as a synonym
for "contradiction," and this does not quite capture the flavor of the auto-antonym.

apparent / clearly so; an illusion

buckle / fasten; fall apart (collapse)
cleft / joined; separated
continue / proceed; (legal) put off proceeding
critical / opposed; essential support
downhill / getting easier; getting worse
dust / remove dust; add dust (crops)
engagement / loving tie; battle
enjoin / command doing; forbid doing
expansive / generous; acquisitive
fast / speedy; immobile
fix / repair; destroy
flop I (theatrical) failure; (non-Pentium math coprocessor) success
handicap I disadvantage; advantage (golf)
homed / with horns; without horns
knockout I collapse; triumph
let / allow; hinder
minimum I no less than; no more than
moot I under consideration; not under consideration
pinch hitter / superior substitute (baseball); inferior sub
overlook I watch over; ignore
oversight / guidance; neglect
quite I slightly; execeedingly
qualified I just right; not quite right (accountant's report)

17
ASCII Extensions to ASL

Reverse pinkie notation Floatino thumb

Unit Increments in the base are indicated by clenching the fist. Touching the left
ear with the right foreflfl98r restores to binary. Tapping the Adam's apple with
the left thumb signals a switch to octal. Sinistral users should add or subtract
(base) t 4 as the case may be, unless performing with mirrors. For IBM card
messages, remember the simple rule: Nine edge leading, palms facing.

"The system has been down 10 hours." "Overflow in reoister 2~

"Heod crash on drum #26."

18
 NLlne 1101101011."

"Loooino off ••. see you tomo ••••ow! "

And now, a few simple 8X8l"CiSM.

~t~=?
If ~ >~ :O-l~1 @} ELSE ~ rs=.. q)
Did you spot the syntax e••••or ~

19
eutoeplstemlc

ravel' tangle; untangle

temper' harden;soften
terrific' repellent; attractive
trim' cut down; embellishing (Christmas tree)
untouchable' eminent; bottom of heap
vegetate' burst forth, germinate; stagnate
zap , delete, erase; add spice

autoeplstemlc adj. (Of a logic) self-knowingly and consistently smug. See

also SW5.

~There are, as I write, a growing number of concurrent enigmata in the multipro-

cessing environment where A needs to know the state of B, and vice versa, and where
B needs to know whether A knows the state of B and vice versa. A's knowledge of its
own state calls for YET ANOTHER set of flags, and so on, until RAM and/or funding is
exhausted.

autoeroticism n. The computer generation of best-selling novels.

=>The Playgol package, for example, ensures the correct distribution of marketable
events by line, paragraph, page, and chapter. The author simply inputs the quotas of
rape, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, uralgomania, bestial rape, necrophilic incest, and
so on, together with the target age group (e.g., "Under 9," "9-12 years," "Light
Parental Guidance").
The ETHELRED os was the first to promote itself via a self-generated Robbinsesque
novella called "The Ethel," of which the following extract must suffice.

Joe Spanasky stubbed out his cigarette. Another late night, he thought. Damn
these Labor-saving devices. His mother had been right. He should have fol-
lowed his brother Antonio into his Godfather's drug pushing syndicate in the
Bronx. "Software is no kind of a job for a man," Momma had cried as he board-
ed her private jet for London two months ago. Still, things had worked out real
good, he thought. He had gained control of the British Computer Society, and
his henchmen were beginning to put the screws on the members. That ballot-rig-
ging expert from the Longshoremen's Union had done a great job .... His next
move was to quadruple the BCS dues, then the IBM UK takeover plan could
move forward.
Joe lit a cigarette and glanced at the EBB numerals on his 24-carat gold
Alpha wrist watch. 23 hundred hours. The computer room downstairs would be
emptying soon. All except Ethel, who would be working late. At the thought of
Ethel he felt the heat surging in his loins. What a doll. A Ph.D in statistics, and
she knew all the standard deviations ... plus a few not in the textbook. Joe
stubbed out his cigarette and turned to the sleek VDU on his desk. He keyed in
his secret account number and paused while the soft-green characters flashed in
acknowledgement. "Tell Ethel I love her," he typed. "Sod off, don't interrupt,"
came the reply, almost instantaneously. Joe smiled at the low-level language and
stubbed out his cigarette on the keyboard. He lit a cigarette and swivelled round

20
 -aware

to the remote air conditioning control panel. He shut down the cooling system
in the computer room and gradually increased the ambient temperature rheostat.
He stubbed out his cigarette and strolled to the elevator. Ignoring the signs, he
lit a cigarette and stepped into the glass-walled corridors, breathing in the satis-
fying smoke.
He stubbed out his cigarette viciously on the Tacky Mat and strode into the
computer room. Ethel was leaning over the throbbing line printer. The heat was
overpowering. His ploy had worked. Ethel had removed her skirt and sweater.
She was straining forward on tiptoe, joggling some cards. The vibrating panels
of the 401 sent cascades of ripples down her ample buttocks. Joe felt the heat
surging through his loins. He took her brutally from behind, a million Think
signs spinning round his head. A juicy dizziness consumed them both and a row
of asterisks clattered out serially on the monitor printer. * * * * * * * * * * * *

autoexec.bat n. What you get when you cross Lee Iaccoca with a vampire
(Light Bits, ComputerWorld, July 26, 1993).

-aware suffix Largely spurious as in data-aware. See also -READY.

21
B
BA [Origin: Egyptian "divine soul" or possibly abbrevs.] 1 Bachelor of Arts.
2 Brain-assisted: a natural reaction to the pandemic of CA (Computer-assist-
ed) acronyms. See BASE.

Babbage n. A language mooted by Tony Karp in the early I980s as a macho

challenge to the then nascent Ada.
~In the event, Ada turned out to be a sturdy, nay, hairy, affair beyond further enmas-
culation. The speed of Babbage, according to Karp, is revealed by the fact that in the
place of "call by reference" and "call by value" we find "call by 'phone."

Babbage, Charles (1792-1871) English polymath and inventor of CAC

(Cog Assisted Computing). See also OEM COGS; ADA.
~Babbage's pioneering contributions to computing go far beyond the prograrn-as-
data concept found in his Analytical Engine. He also invented the concept of demon-
strating a series of working but non-scalable prototypes in order to attract government
funding. Further, the influence of Babbage's non-Victorian friendship with Lord
Byron's married daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) clearly
reaches forward to urban 20th century Afro-American music:

My baby's got somethin'like a grinding mill;

My baby she's got somethin'like a grinding mill;
Every time she touch me, 0 Lord, I can't keep still.
("Grinding Mill Blues," Johnny Temple, Chicago, 1939)

There is no "rosebud" mystery about Babbage's dying words: "Vive la difference! Vive
l'engin!"

Babble n. A rare, honestly named text-generation package devised by

Korenthal Associates.
~Babble deconstructs thirty or so canned texts in different genres, ranging from
Beatles to Zola by way of Bible, DickJane, Insults, and Robbins. There is even a John
C. Dvorak mode, but no mention of his bestselling coauthors! A pleasant screen lets
you set mix ratios to generate a randomly risible stream of "sentences" from three cho-
sen modes. A choice of 30 percent Bible, 30 percent Robbins, and 40 percent Insult,
for instance, gives such fragments as "Lo you nerdfaced toad silk gown rustling unto
death ... " and so on. Yes, it palls quite quickly. There are other tricks to jazz up the
action. Using every possible function key, Ctrl, and Alt combination, you can select
any number of dialectal overlays and typographical templates: Pig Latin, Jewish,
Brooklyn, Rasta, Mirror, Ransom Note, and so on (BEV is noticeably absent, though).
These throw in the occasional "Oy" and "choiping boids" as well as some amusing dis-
play variations. The spooky Censor overlay blacks out words at random, for example,
while Whisper and Shout switch to dim and bold-caps. Apart from selling Babble to

22
 ballpark

the late William Burroughs, I do see a market I refer to the party conversation piece
market. What do you show your visitors when they say "Oh, you have a computer'''?
Entering your guests names with an 80 percent dose of Insult and several cocktails can
add much hilarity to your party. More fun than showing your latest spreadsheets or
those tired revolving beach balls.
BABOl n. [© Irish Business Machines.] A common language proposed to
heal the endless, bloody logomachic schisms which fragment the industry.
BABOL combines the compactness of COBOL and the legibility of J with the
portable brick-shit-house safety of C and the ancient get-it-done wisdom of
JCL.
backtracking n. The rare admission that an impasse has been reached or a
DEADLINE exceeded.

backup n. & v. & adj. 1 n. Any file, device, or person that results from back-
ing up; the total deviance from the original is directly proportional to the num-
ber and scale of the catastrophes resulting from each copying or matching
error. 2 v. intrans. To compound errors while merely trying to perpetuate
them. 3 v. trans. To risk (a file, program) by attempting to copy it. 4 v. trans.
(Of a programmer, engineer) to specify someone unacquainted with the sys-
tem, job, and user. See also STANDBY. 5 adv. Annoyingly, as: ''That salesman
got my backup."
backward adj. (Of a reasoning chain) 1Primitive. 2 Taking the truth of an
implied proposition as verification of its antecedents (see also SYLLOOISM) as
1D

IF "You are overdrawn" THEN PRINT BALANCE<O

Compare FORWARD.

ballpark adj. [Origin: U.S. branch of measure theory known as baseball.] 1

Deliberately underquoted, as: ''The ballpark price is $25K." 2 Deliberately
overquoted, as: ''The printer speed varies with layout, buffer size, font reper-
toire, form depth, urgency, and humidity, but a ballpark figure is 500 charac-
ters per minute."
~ The basis of baseball measure theory is the analysis of input data from a series of
fiscal, ballistic, gymnastic, and a1tercatoryexperiments held at ballparks each summer.
The game space is divided into discrete plays, each of which can be reduced to about
250 numerical parameters. The definition of the measure Il on this set can be varied to
produce any desired ordering of the players, teams, managers, owners, fans, conform-
ing streaks, and hotdog sales, e.g., player X has struck out more often than any other
left-handed third-base Jewish Cardinal in the eighth inning of an Easter Friday road
game played on Astro turf.

23
bandwidth

The Stan Kelly-James Baseball Bible is the only publication that stat-tracks the
plight of home-run balls and in-the-seats fouls (hit-by; caught-by [including assists]
with name and seat number; whether retained or thrown back in disgust). It also main-
tains statistics on celebrity game-start pitches, e.g., President Ford's record is: 4 balls,
o strikes, 2 passed balls, 5 wild pitches, 3 hit umpires, and 6 balks. To those who doubt
our credentials, it should be noted that Kelly-James has struck out less often than Barry
Bonds, has walked fewer players than Sandy Koufax, and has been caught stealing less
often than Ricky Henderson.

bandwidth n. 1 (During the Big Band era) between fifty and sixty feet
depending on the orientation of Count Basie's piano. 2 (Of a computer bus)
an upper limit to the error-transfer rate.

BASE n. [Acronym for Brain-assisted Software Engineering (Tom Lister).]

See also BA; CA; CASE.

base address n. Low-rent accommodation of the kind frequented by oper-

ators, programmers, and other no-collar workers.
~Even cheaper accommodation is possible-a relative address-if you have an aunt
or uncle living in the area.

base class n. (C++) No less respected than its specialized derivations:

" Why bastard? wherefore base?
" Why brand they us
"With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?"
(King Lear, act I, scene 2)
BASIC n. [Origin: Either acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code or Geology: basic "containing relatively little silica."]
Originally, a simple mid-level language used to test the student's ability to
increment line numbers, but now available only in complex, extended ver-
sions. See EXTENDED BASIC, VISUAL BASIC.
~To determine the amount of silica in your code, use

on all your strings. Scores below 5 are reassuring; scores over, say, 10 mean that you
are probably using FORTRAN by mistake. Consult your supervisor at once.

Batch, Elsie See DANGLING ELSE.

Bayeslanlsm n. [Origin: Either the Reverend Thomas Bayes (1701-1761)

or French baiser "to kiss or swive."] The application of theology to statistics,
or vice versa.

24
 bInary

~8ayes' formulae can be used to calculate the conditional probability that FUZZY
Logic will succeed given the prior certainty that Lotti ZADEH is stark, raving mad.

BBC [Acronym for Bjarne's Better C.] See c++.

BEL [abbrev. Bell] The ASCII 07 code. See also A..EEP.

~A communications ARCHAISM recalling the days when your attention was solicited
by electromechanical tintinnabulation.
benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to
obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems. See also
MENDACITY SEQUENCY.

bends n. pI. [Origin: Borrowed from sailors' slang for caisson disease.] A
painful, paralyzing, sometimes fatal dizziness caused by unseemly haste in
implementing a BaITOM-UP programming project.

besack v. intrans. [Origin uncertain: possibly Russian bez "lacking" + ACK

"a feedback signal during communications indicating acceptance."] To engage
in a prolonged monologue on diverse subjects beyond the speaker's compe-
tence and the listener's interest. Also called (Brit.) malik.

best-last search n. Known in Ireland as the Polish search; and in Poland as

the Irish search. See also ETHNOLOGY.
beta adj. (Of a software version) the one that ships.
~Originally, beta software was sent only to volumteer testers who had signed a
nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Unfortunately, most such volunteers had previously
signed disclosure agreements with a competitor. See a/so ALPHA.
better adj. & adv. Originally intended to indicate a later version, as in
"requires DOS 2.0 or better." Now ambiguous: e.g., "DOS 4.0 or better"
includes all DOS versions with the possible exception of DOS 6.0.

bidirectional adj. 1 (Of a printer) boustrophedonic. 2 (Of a system) being

down or up. 3 (Of a consultant) able to move toward a prospect and away
from a client. 4 (Of a paper- or magnetic-tape drive) able to wrench the medi-
um from both the right- and left-hand reels.
bin n. [Origin dubious: abbrev. binary or dustbin (U.S. trash can).] A suitable
receptacle for your compiler/linker output. See also GARBAGE.
binary adj. 1 Offering little choice; maximizing the chance of error. 2
Relating to the 20th century's boring challenge to the Babylonians. 3 Relating
to a numbering system introduced to protect children from parental help dur-

25
binary search

ing math homework assignments. 4 Reflecting the quintessential dichotomy

of the universe. See also BIT.

binary search n. A locational strategy devised by J. W. R. Dedekind

(1831-1916) which worked perfectly until the advent of the file-oriented dig-
ital computer. The search is, in fact, misnamed since there are three possible
outcomes: not-there, wrong-find, find. The rarity of the last explains the mis-
nomer.

binding time n. The moment when the hash table becomes corrupted.
=*Advances in computing can be mapped against the "lateness of binding:' which has
me thinking about my own so-called CS so-called career: golden past, gray present,
and rosy future. This is my version of Synge's optimism: the grass is greener except at
=
t O. On EDSAC I, my functions (5ch paper-tape subroutines) were punched, spliced,
and bound about two weeks before input. This is known as premature binding and calls
for deftness with elastic bands. FORTRAN came next with a new kind of binding: soggy
decks of cards that refused to be shuffled. Then with Algol and C, I enjoyed static
(compile-time) binding, until C++ brought the numbing joys of dynamic (run-time)
binding. My current research aims at delaying the binding until well after execution. I
call this end-time binding, as prophesied in St. Matthew's Gospel: ••... and whatsoever
thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ....•• (Matthew 16: 19 KJV).

BIOS n. 1 A chip offering Basic YO Support. 2 Biographical summaries in

job-application CV s.

=*Which can claim the higher density of misinformation? Close call. See a/so SOCIAL
CLIMBERS.

bistable adj. Pertaining or relating to an above-average system which is sta-

ble approximately 50 percent of the time.

bit n. & adj. [Origin: Either Old English bita "something small or unimpor-
tant," or engineering bit "a boring tool."] 1 n. The quantum of misinforma-
tion. 2 n. One-half of the fee needed to carry out a threat, as: "For two bits I'd
ram this board down your stupid throat." 3 n. A BINARY digit: a boringly
dichotomic entity which precludes rational discussion. "Avoid situations
which offer only two courses of action" (S. Murphy). 4 adj. (Of a program-
mer) inadequate; versed only in FORTRAN or RPG. 5 adj. (Of a map) many-
1 and many-O. The Is in an AlphaMicro bit map indicate to the system those
sectors of mass memory which are immune from further corruption.

bit bucket n. [Origin: possibly (vulg.) Cockney rhyming slang.] 1 A binary

spittoon. 2 A digital cuspidor.
=*Bit buckets are analogous to the receptacles fitted in the back of high-priced televi-
sion sets to catch the corpses of cowboys and indians. Without a well-placed bit buck-

26
 body

et to collect overflow characters as they are coughed up from stretched stacks and rau-
cous registers, an offensive GRUNGE accumulates beneath the computer cabinets. This
binary detritus, if left to fester, can be a hazard to operational health and efficiency.

bltmap n. 1 The ultimate in painting-by-numbers. 2 The very large, but never

quite large enough, set of bytes representing the PIXEL positions and colors of
a tasteless image. 3 The memory vendors' best friend.
bltomancy n. also ftagomancy. Dubious predictions based on the state of
your registers. See also -MANey.
blank card n. Also called spacer card. An unpunched card placed in an
input deck at lO,OOO-card intervals. Since electromechanical devices enjoy a
consistent 1-1()4 error rate, the blank-card trick minimizes the impact of card-
reader malfunctions.
:::)The Zen representative at the ISO (International Standards Organization) has pro-
posed that certain card punching conventions be observed to avoid the present confu-
sion between space, blank, null, and "not there." It does seem helpful to have a positive
"not there" column code so that missing columns and cards--the erstwhile bane of unit
recorders-can be punched and verified before input Perforatricial productivity pay-
ment schemes, which traditionally penalize columnar oversights, would reward sins of
omission and commission with equal severity. The Zen convention demands that each
blank card be punched and verified (a total of 160 keystrokes), but whether a missing
blank card requires this effort or not is still subject to intense mootation.

bloat, code n. See CODE BLOAT.

blob, BLOb n. Acronym for Binary Large Object. Codd'n'Date's scifi night-
mare in which huge unstructured thingies attack the relational integrity of all
we love.

block n. & v. trans. 1 n. The place of execution. 2 v. trans. To hinder (a user,

job, program) by changing the password or improving the operating system.
3 v. trans. To interject control characters at arbitrary points (in a message)
prior to transmission.

blockhead n. The first character foolish enough to venture into a VTAM

applications program.
blyb n. (ISO GUI unit) An 8 x 8 fuzzy PIXEL matrix, or 16 SEURATS.

BO Overloaded abbrev. Board of Ordinance; Box Office; Back Order; Branch

Office; Brought Over; Best Offer; Broker's Order; Buyer's Option; Bugger
Off; Body Odor ... but the greatest of these is Bugger Off.

body n. The defining bulk of a FUNCTION.

27
bonus

bonus n. Usually called added bonus. [Latin bonus "good."] 1 n. Payroll A

random amount added to your net pay to compensate for random withholding
errors. 2 Any unexpected, additional benefit encountered or offered when all
seems to be going well.
~The superstitious, i.e., experienced, DP person dreads and shuns all added bonuses.
They are known as portents of 12th-hour revenge and disaster in nonadjacent modules.
Thus:

"Finishing the stock update by 3:00 P.M. provides the added bonus of two extra
hours on the Fixed Asset Depreciation Schedule."

"If you order the additional 16K RAM. you get the added bonus of three days free
tuition in BASIC from one of our extended counselors."

"Our book club will save you up to 40 percent off normal retail price. and as a
bonus. your name will be passed to 98 carefully selected mailing lists."

books, computer n. See COMPUTER BOOKS.

books for the baffled n. See LOW-SELf-ESTEEM BOOKS.

Boole, Fred (1810-1884) George Boole's older, unheralded logical brother,

also self-taught, who stuck to his father's cobbling trade from first to last, hav-
ing early decided that the best Boolean was two watertight wellies, left and
right, and that the true table of truth should hold the harvest home. And, to the
avec-tes-sabots of Lincolnshire, wasn't Fred the super Boole?

bootstrap n. & v. trans. [Origin: from the fictional attempts by Baron

Mtinchhausen (described by Rudolf Raspe, 1785) to refute Newton's third
law. Subsequent real bids at self-levitation led to the disappearance of straps
from the footwear environment.] 1 n. The first straw that breaks the system's
back. 2 v. trans. Also called boot To ensnare (an operating system or program)
in a sneaky, cumulative manner.
~The thought that a cold system needs to read in the read-in subroutine before it can
read in anything has kept countless amateur ontogenists and etiologists from the arms
of Morpheus since the dawn of cybernetic consciousness. The practical DP pioneers
chickened out of this infinite regress by laying a golden egg. to wit, a bootstrap.
A Dead Sea scroll fragment from Cave 2 seems to indicate that "A time to boot and
a time to kick" belongs in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 to further emphasize the absurdity of
everything.

bottom-down adj. [© Irish Business Machines.] Relating to a pessimistic

and discredited programming METHODOLOGY.

~Bottom-down projects are characterized by deep-rooted doubts as to where to start,

and by a signal lack of progress once started. Compare BOITOM-UP; MIDDLE-OUT; TOP-
DOWN.

28
 broket

bottom-line n. The 25th line on a typical monitor screen, reserved for error
messages. This convention is also used on balance sheets and other financial
reports.

bottom-up adj. Relating to a programming methodology in which the finer

details are coded before any study of the overall needs of the system has been
made.
=>Historically, the bottom-up approach replaced the less optimistic BOTIOM-DOWN
strategy, only to be challenged by the TOP-DOWN philosophy. A recent Taoist revolution
bids fair to replace all three with the M1DDLE-oUT credo. Project coordinators still work-
ing in the bottom-up environment face the happy task of blending a cornucopia of
well-written but mutually contradictory submodules. The ideal bottom-up coordinator
should be a top-downer at heart, able to dive in before any of the team have surfaced,
meet them at three fathoms or less, and gain control of their oxygen control valves. See
also BENDS.

Bourbaki, Nicolas (?-?) 1 Mythical Poldavian hiding the identities of a set

of leading but shy French mathematicians engaged in endless axiomatic
groupware. 2 Real columnist for Al Expert magazine.

Bourne shell n. [Named for Dr. Stephen R. Bourne.] The first and best of
the UNIX shells, the hard currency of which is characterized by the $ PROMPT.
=>The old UNIX joke, "If you don't like the Bourne shell, write your own," was unfor-
tunately taken seriously by several M' AS-TU-VUS, adding further to the pains of Unicial
VERSlONms.

Brady Gooch The spooneristic doyen of OBJECf ORIENTEERING often con-

fused with Crad Box.

Braln-asslsted See BA.

breakpoint n. 1 A situation in which the system and the programmer are tied
after a certain number of runs and the winner is decided by a sudden-death
series of DUMPS. 2 The delightful but self-defeating moment when the DPM dis-
misses the entire systems/programming team, the user rejects the supplier, and
four overextended legal partnerships meet to berate the litigious fervor of their
respective clients. 3 (Debugging) A line in a program highlighted by the clair-
voyant and dubious.

broket n. [Origin: by analogy with "bracket," a broken bracket. From JARGON

Also called angle bracket. Either of the characters "<" and ">."
FILE.]

=>Dirac also broke the bracket, giving us the quantumously mysterious bra <xl and
Icet Iy>.

29
browse v. 1 (Of a book) to read leisurely. 2 (Of an object-hierarchy) to chain
frantically in all directions. See also AlITO-ANJ'ONYM.

BTFFHT [Abbrev. BROWSE the Fine Friendly HyperText.] The GUI equivalent
ofRTFM.

bubble memory n. A storage device developed by South Sea Memory

Products Inc.
~The chief advantage of bubbles over floppies is that they cannot be folded by the
mailperson. Whether bubbles will ever replace the hard disk (which is also beyond the
bending power of most postal workers) depends on the relative strength of the semi-
conductor and metallurgical lobbies.

bubble sort n. A program for arranging memory bubbles in any desired

sequence (by diameter, mass, viscosity, manufacturer, cost, etc.).

buffer n. [Origin obscure: possibly Italian buffo "farcical, comic" or Latin

bulo "a toad."] 1 A region between two devices designed to distort or, if pos-
sible, prevent the flow of data in either direction. 2 An old, greasy, and abra-
sive rag used to clean tape heads and floppy drives.

bug n. [Entomology obscure.] 1 An undocumented feature. 2 A mythical

scapegoat invoked by all sections of the DP industry: "A pox on the bug and
a bug on the pox, for one or t' other plagues my TOS" (Sir John Thumpstaft').
~The word implies that "things go wrong" because of some infection from outside.
The gremlin which caused all malfunctions during World War n was an openly ficti-
tious imp, blamed in jest; the DP bug, however, has assumed the unfunny proportions
of an infestation. Putting things right, or DEBUGGING, therefore, requires the equivalent
of fumigation, chlorination, swabbing, or, to use the proper chemotherapeutic termi-
nology, "nailing the little bastards." That the epidemic persists would indicate that
there are terminal diseases beyond the remedial arts of computer science. The ailing
user is often advised to "keep taking the tablets and see how you feel in the morning."
The patient must accept the palliative KLUDGE or the placebo of a MAJOR NEW-LEVEL
RELEASE. Since, in truth, most OP errors arise from sins of omission, rather than com-
mission, the appropriate medical analogy to the OP bug is not infection but metabolic
disorder or vitamin deficiency.

bundled adj. [From the verb bundle "to throw together in haphazard fash-
ion."] Of or relating to an arbitrary collection of software items offered AS IS,
without charge or warranty, to certain prospects in a competitive environment.
~Of interest to sociolinguists is the fact that the OP usage of bundled was triggered
by the prior introduction of the antonym unbundled by mM the previous day. See also
UNBUNDLING.

30
 bus

bus n. A ponderous vehicle for transporting people or data at irregular inter-

vals.
::>Note, however, that "missing the bus" has opposite connotations in the people and
data environments: a failure for folk, but a blessing for bits. Of the contending mini- and
microbus formats ("You say ISA and I say EISA ... "), the ruthless, teutonic SS-I00
standanl is certain to dominate. As the name suggests, a task force of highly motivated
"standards specialists" regularly descends upon non-conforming stockists, outside of
normal trading hours, and throws some rather exegetical pitches. Few can resist the
board-crunching logic of these visits.
c
$CALL n. or interj. 1 An outrageous price that the advertiser dare not reveal
in print. 2 $404,149 (Turing base-32).

C n. A brilliant mix of low high-level and high low-level languages devised

chiefly by Dennis M. Ritchie at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s.
See also c++; NATURAL C; UNIX.
=>C was named as the successor to Ken Thompson's B, which in turn was derived
from Martin Richard's BCPL. This oversimplified history at least explains the in-joke:
Will C be enhanced to D or to P? The answer seems to be "Neither." For some, known
as the "No Power Without Danger" gang, C is the ultimate portable peril and needs just
an occasional ANSI tweak to maintain its supremacy. Others are betting on C++ as the
source of even more exciting obfuscation for the upper classes.
The rapid, some say insidious, growth of C is no surprise to those sharing the pro-
grammer's dream: a dizzy pointer-powered access to the silicon innards without the
irksome sweat of ASSEMBLER. The C industry has reached the point where there is now
a C book devoted to each extant line of code, and a C pun for every keyword.

C++ Also called BBC: Bjarne's Better C, A version of the C language post-
fix-incremented with ideas from Simula by Bjarne Stroustrup at AT&T Bell
Laboratories in the early 1980s.
=>The original 1980 version was called "C with Classes," until the catchy C++ desig-
nation was suggested by Rick Mascitti in 1983. This name caught on irreversibly
before more careful syntactical and semantic analyses indicated that the prefix-incre-
mental ++C would have provided a more appropriate appellation. Misguided
OORYPHORES insist that C++ figuratively says "enhance (increment) the C language,
then use the unenhanced version" (see e.g., The C++ Programming Language. Bjame
Stroustrup, Addison-Wesley, 1987, p. 4, and Randall Bart's letter to the C Users
Journal, December 1991). The difference between C++ and ++C (where C is a wax-
able variable) is best seen in the following snippet:

int x=O, C=O;

x ++C; II both x and C now equal 1
x C++; II x still equals 1 but C equals 2
x = C++; II x now equals 2 but C equals 3 ..•
x = C++; II x now equals 3 but C equals 4 ...

So, there is no doubt that C++ (figuratively) does eventually "improve" C, but you
have to keep at it!
One can also, possibly, defend the term C++ from general, descriptive linguistic
considerations: meanings are derived from current and evolving usage not from "ety-
mology." Thus, Jerusalem Artichokes are neither artichokes nor from David's City.

32
 c+-

A more credible defense of C++ rests on the fact that in post-2.1 versions of C++
(such as the current ANSI C++) the prefix and postfix ++ operators can be separately
overloaded for user-defined types. Thus, following Christopher Hecker, we can define a
class Language and overload the prefix and postfix Language: :operator++ :
Language& Language::operator++() II prefix

BetterSelf ( );
return (*this) ;

inline Language& Language::operator++(int dummy)

I I postfix
{
return(++(*this»;

Language C, X; II declare Language objects C and X

X = C++; II X is enhanced C and Bjarne's your Uncle!

Hecker has therefore proposed, without high hopes of general acceptance, that the lan-
guage be called C.operator++(dummy).

See also c; c+-; CLASS; OBJECT.

C+- n. \pronounced C more or less\ A language devised for the AI communi-

ty by Richard Nelson and Dr. Michael Hirsch, with extensions by Marina
Michaels, Tom Clune, and THIS writer.
=>Unlike C++, C+- is a subject-oriented language. Each C+- class instance (or sub-
ject) holds hidden (or superprivate) data members, known as prejudices or undeclared
preferences, that are impervious to all messages, as well as public members known as
boasts or claims. The following C operators are overridden as shown:
> better than
< worse than
» much better than

«forget it

! not on your life

= = comparable, other things being equal

C+- is a strongly-typed language based on stereotyping and self-righteous logic.

The Boolean variables TRUE and FALSE (known as constants in less realistic lan-
guages) are supplemented with CREDIBLE and DUBIOUS, which are fuzzier than ZADEH'S

33
CA-

traditional FUZZY categories. All Booleans can be declared with the modifiers strong
and weak. Weak implication is said to "preserve deniability," and was added at the
request of the DoD to ensure compatibility with future versions of Ada. WFF's (well-
formed falsehoods) are assignment-compatible with all Booleans.
WHAT IF and WHY Nor tests are aided by the special conditional

evenifnot (X) {Y};

C+- supports information hiding and. among FRIEND classes only. rumor sharing.
Borrowing from the Eiffellexicon, non-friend classes can be killed by arranging con-
tracts. Note that friendships are intransitive. volatile and non-Abelian. The locale
mechanism is enhanced by a series of calumnies of type ethnic.
Single and multiple inheritance mechanisms are implemented with random muta-
tions. Disinheritance rules are covered by a complex probate protocol. In addition to
base classes. derived classes. and abstract classes. C+- supports gut classes. In certain
locales Polygamous derivations and bastard classes are permitted. Elsewhere. loose
coupling between classes is illegal so the marriage and divorce operators may be need-
ed as follows:
marriage (MParentl, FParentl);
II child classes can now be derived
sclass MySclass: public MParentl, FParentl
{ ... }
sclass YourSclass: public MParentl, FParent2
II illegitimate
divorce (MParentl, FParentl);
marriage (MParentl, FParent2);
sclass YourSclass: public MParentl, FParent2
{ ... II legal!
}

Operator precedence and other rules can be suspended with the DWIM (Do What I
Mean) pragma.
ANSlfication will be firmly resisted. C+-'s slogan is "Raise High Your Own
Standard!"

CA· [Acronymical prefix.] Computer-aided X or Computer-assisted X.

~The flood of CA-prefixed acronyms (CASE. CAD, CAI. CAL•... ) does not yet
include the vital one: CAC (Computer-aided Computing) and the potentially infinite
regress (CA(CA( ... »)C.
Borrowing this format, Tom Lister has suggested the prefix BA- (Brain-assisted-).
as in BASE for Brain-assisted Software Engineering and other endeavours unencum-
bered by yet another bug-ridden layer. Meilir Page-Jones prefers HA- (Human-assist-
ed-), proving again that METHODOLOGISTS love to major in the minors ("Mine arrows
are more pointed than thine").

34
 CAPA

cache n. & v. \pronounced cash.\ 1 n. A secret hiding place for data and
instructions. 2 v. To hide in a cache. See also OUBUEITE.
~Cache memory is usually faster and more expensive than standard RAM, leading to
much puerile wordplay (esp. cache cow, "cache in your chips," and so on). See also
PUN MORATORIUM.

CAD n. [Acronym for Computer-aided Delay or, archaic, Computer-aided

Design.] The automation of the traditionally manual delays between the vari-
ous stages of product development: research and development, drawing office,
prototyping, testing, pre-production planning, etc. The improved delays
invariably lead to better products.

CAI n. [Computer-aided Instruction.] The misguided attempt to replace each

teacher in the Bronx with 60 on-line terminals. Compare CAL.

CAL n. 1 [Acronym for CALifornia or, archaic, Computer-aided Learning.]

A superior West Coast (U.S.A.) version of CAI in which each teacher is
replaced by 25 on-line terminals. 2 [Acronym for Computer-aided Litigation.]
The automated circumvention of the law. More at DP ATIORNEY; PATENT; WRIT-
ONLY.

~Our increasingly litigious citizenry, of whom the majority are now blessed with
appropriate law degrees and willing to act contingently for the minority, and to whom
every action entails an actionable tort, has found CAL programs to be a WRrr-DNLY
blessing. Object-oriented versions of CAL have emerged to deal with class actions.

call n. [Origin: theater, as in the traditional request "Five minutes, darling!"]

A polite but rarely heeded plea for help from one piece of troubled coding (the
caller) to another (the callee). Subsequent, less polite, calls are known as yells
and screams. See also ARGUMENT; GOSUB; WIRTH; RETURN.
~The vexatious taxonomy of "calls" includes "by name," "by value," "by location,"
"for conference papers," and, in emergencies, "by dialing 911." Further spice is added
to the situation by allowing the callee to act as caller, and so on down a long dusty,
nested road. Signs that say "Please leave the STACK as you found it," are regularly
ignored, and some callers risk blindness by calling themselves.

callback adj. [From the popular lie "I'll call you back on that .... "] In WIN-
DOWS, of a user-defined function waiting indefinitely for the big EVENT.

campus n. [Latin campus "field (of battle)."] An area of scholastic and

riotous endeavor offering students their first real opportunity to freak a large
timesharing system. See also RESPONSE TIME.

CAPA [Overloaded acronym: Comite d' Action pour la Productivite dans

I' Assurance; Closet Accordion Players of America.]

35
card

~Those who claim that no real overloading is likely between such distinctive seman-
tic domains must be unaware of Zachary Beausoleil, FlA, FCA, FAA, the Cajun actu-
ary, who regularly performs in both NAMESPACES.

card n. 1 Also board. A rectangular ratbag of components intended to add

FUNCTIONALITY to a PC. In real life, the PC seldom has matching, or any, card
SLars to fulfill this promise. 2 Also called punch cardt punched cardt tab
card, Hollerith card. [Origin: from earlier, more predictable games of chance
and necromantic divination.] A 7 3/8-inch x 3 l/4-inch looseleaf scratchpad
system designed to fit normal shirt pockets (other sizes are available for the
abnormal), but sometimes (with growing rarity) underused as an 80 x 12 ana-
log-digital matrix. "If T. J. Watson, Sr., had played his cards right, he could
have made his name in computing" (M. Thumps).
~The optimum size of the 80-column card is a strange accident arising from the par-
simony of Dr. Herman Hollerith, who wanted a cheap filing system for his card-based
census of 1890. He therefore designed his card to fit the filing trays available, which
were based on the dimensions of the 1890 dollar bill. The latter, naturally, had been
created with standard wallet and shirt-pocket sizes in mind. Despite the ravages of
inflation, Herman's card survives. Rival formats come and go, but nothing can budge
the diehard chemisier.

card, blank n. See BLANKCARD.

cascaded or cascading adj. (Of a GUI menu system) sisyphean, with the
happy SIDE-EFFECfof delaying, or postponing indefinitely, the USER'Saccess
to an application.
~A recent ANSI Mouse standard decrees that the depth of a cascaded menu system
must not exceed the maximum rated MCBF (Mean Clicks Between Failure).

case n. 1 A keyword in several computer languages that avoids the ignominy

of multiple conditional GOTOswithout reducing the dangers. See also DEFAULT;
TRAPDOOR. 2 (Archaism) the state of a keyboard or character (upper or lower).
The term is yet another survivor from earlier printing technology when capi-
tal letters were stored in cases (boxes) above the small-letter cases.

CASE n. [Acronym for Computer-aided Software Engineering.] See CA-;

SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING;
METHODOLOGY.
~ Thick layers between the programmer and a running application are known as
UPPER CASE tools; the thinner versions as lower case. Some see Abe Lincoln as a
pioneer of the latter: "As our case is new, we must think anew" (Dec. 1862).

case-Insensitive adj. (Of terminologists and trademarkers) woefully indif-

ferent to the horrors of interword case shifts.

36
 CEU

=*A random scan of the advertiser index reveals AutoSystems, CompuExpo,

CoSession, EasySpooler, QualTrack, SunPro, and UniPress. But the greatest of these
is NeXT.

case-Insensitivity n. The thoughtless promulgation of unnaturally case-

sensitive or typographically challenging trade names. See also CASE-INSENSI-
TIVE.

=*Thus we encounter offenders such as NeXT, dBASE, eXceed, PEXlib, aD

nAuSeaM. These abominations are proudly protected by law. Perhaps abomination is
too strong: imagine the infinite horror of reading ''EndlOsung™ is a trademark of H.
Goering Enterprises, May 1941."
Knuth's text formatter TEX is a forgivable, outrageously special case: (i) writing it
as TeX or TEX means you are not using T EX (ii) The final "X" is really a Greek upper-
case chi and calls for a touch of Scouse-fricative expectoration. More at TEX,TNHO.

cast n. & v. trans. [Origin Biblical: " ... and they shall cast them into an
unclean place ... " (Leviticus 14:40).] Also called type-cast. 1n. The conver-
sion of a variable from its correct DATA TYPE. If the variable objects, the con-
version is known as coercion. 2 v. trans. To circumvent the safety of data typ-
ing; thus, strongly-typed languages can be rendered weak, and weakly-typed
languages given the coup de boutoir. See also OVERCAST
=*Another text confirming the dangers of miscasting has Moses struggling with het-
erogeneous joins on a primitive SQL system: "And I took the two tables, and cast them
out ... and brake them before your eyes" (Deuteronomy 9: 17).

Catastrophe n. See SEVEN CATASTROPHES OF COMPUTING, THE.

Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality n. Baron Cauchy gets the green card;

Schwarz is deported.

CDC Abbrev. Control Data Corporation; Center for Disease Control. Warning
Often resists contextual disambiguation.

CD-ROM n. \Pronounced seedy-romm.\ [Acronym for Compact Disk Read-

Only Memory.] A 680 MB platter of "electronic papyrus" exploiting the
COMPTON EFFECT.

=>Fifteen CD-ROMs will hold Wagner's Ring cycle or an animated version of the
Windows NT32 Help file. The choice, America, is yours!

CEU n. [Continuing Education Unit.] One of a sequence of random integers

issued in a version of keno known as adult education.
=>Players achieving certain preordained totals are required to yell "Ex-tra curr-i-cu-
la!" before claiming their diplomas in such diverse fields as brain surgery, intermedi-
ate mollusk sexing, and nonmonotonic fuzzy logic for the small business user.

37
child

Participating readers who have successfullv reached this page are entitled to deduct
two CEU from their accumulated tally.

chad n. (plural chadim) A piece of confetto produced by a tape or card

punch. More at TNHD.

chad less tape n. Paper tape prepared on a punch with blunt pins. See a/so
CHAD.

Chain or Cha'n, Daisy. See DAISY CHAIN.

channeler n. A/so SPIRIT GUIDE. Politically correct terms for DAEMON. See
a/so PC UNIX.

chaos n. & adj. \Often pronounced tchowss\ [Indo-European gheu, "yawn,

gape," whence *ghau and Greek khaos, "chasm, empty space."] 1 n. The bor-
ingly normal state of all computer projects. 2 n. The pandemonium in the pop-
ular science publishing houses when books on Catastrophe Theory failed to
sell. 3 adj. (Of a theory) confirming the programmer's intuition that theoreti-
cally deterministic systems are in practice unsystematically indeterministic
due to their sensitivity to initial conditions, especially the choice of method-
ologist, language, compiler, and mouse pad.
~It is reassuring to note that many respected cosmogenies
see Chaos as the BASE
CLASS of creation. For example, the goddess Tiamat (representing
the chaos of the salt-
water seas) is slain by the god Marduk who then creates the cosmos from her body
parts.

Cherlln, Edward M. (1946-) CofounderlPublisher of APL News (6611

Linville Drive, Weed, CA 96094). As an ordained priest of the Order of
Buddhist Contemplatives, Cherlin is uniquely qualified to create and dissem-
inate NULL SET jokes (a/so called Empty Array jokes), including elaborate tax-
onomies of the NOP. Following the publication of Robert Pirsig's novel (Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 1974), Cherlin issued an affidavit
swearing never to write or refer to "Zen and the Art of Computer
Programming." Others, it seems, have ignored this sensible attitude (e.g.,
Peter G. Neumann, "Psychosocial Implications of Computer Software
Development and Use: Zen and the Art of Computing," SRI International,
ACM Sigsoft, SEN, April 1982). See a/so ZADEH, LarFI.

Chinese remainder theorem n. More strictly, a conjecture that there

exists an N >= 3 such that after World War N the set of surviving Chinese will
be nonempty. A corollary asserts that for N + I the set will be less nonempty.
If the set is exhausted after M trials, we define World War M as the War to end
all conjectures.

38
 click

~United States and Soviet nuclear strategies were for many years so heavily based on
this conjecture that diverse computer simulations to test its valididity were attempted.
Behind the scenes, in fact, the Cold War was really a hectic ADA-APL benchmark. Both
sets of models proved to be inconclusive and expensive, and there was mounting pres-
sure to divert the Pentagonal and Soviet OR budgets into more reliable, practical
experiments. Glasnost arrived, just in time...

Chinese total n. I Almost a billion. 2 A checksumMETHODOLOGY original-

ly devised for YODALS (Yangtse Opium Den Accounts Leceivable System),
whence often referred to as a hash total. Also called (mainly in China)
Russian or Czech total.
Chinese VMOS n. For full details, please consult the Yellow Pages. See NET-
WOK; VMOS.

chording n. Replacing the keyboard with an eight-button MOUSE.

~The WIDE character sets needed for non-ASCII-disabled languages can be accom-
modated with Morse-like chord CLICKS supplemented by various button ARPEGGIOS.

circulation, controlled n. (Computer journalism) A method of magazine

distribution financed by the advertisers. Subscribers qualify by responding
optimistically to question 3: How many Crays do you hope to purchase this
week?

CIS Overloaded initialism for Compuserve Information Services (also called

CIS because of the cost); Confederation of Independent States (ex-Soviet
Union).
~Cynics have claimed that the former is distinguishable by its chaotic mismanage-
ment. Dick O'Connor, Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, reports 103 CIS over-
loads including Canadian Iris Society, Catholic Information Society, and his own
Coordinated Information System.

class n. & adj. [Origin: Latin classis via colore, "to call to arms."] I n.
(Object-orienteeering) Data members encapsulated with a set of METHODS
dying to get at them. 2 n. (Marxism) A subset of society encapsulated with a
set of methods for exploiting and exterminating both itself and other subsets
of society. 3 n. (Style) Someth'n' you jest plain got or don't. 4 adj. (Of a
struggle) iterative, as in the attempted modularization of real-word activities.
See also 00; c++; C+-; ENCAPSULATION; INSTANCE; INSTANTIATION; OBJECT.
click v. trans. To press a MOUSE button and then release it.
~This central GUI ritual is often touted as the epitome of INTUrrIVITY. The mouse-
pointing prelude to the click is readily mastered, of course, given that your balls are
clean, the mouse-pad-cum-Iunch-tray cleared for action, and both CURSOR and target
8m-POINT visible through the metaphorical mess. However, several aspects of the

39
client/server

click-qua-click are far from obvious: choice of button(s), number of clicks, simultane-
ous use of Shift, ALT, and Ctrl keys, and what has been called the trigger-happiness
factor. The ideal, single-button mouse has now given way to two- and three-button ver-
sions, offering considerable scope for non-intuitive left, middle, right, and even com-
plex CHORDING variations. Even the most common left-or-right button choice can be
clouded by the software option to reverse the button designations, offered by many
OUIs to placate the vocal sinistrous minority. To discover if your mouse behavior has
been re-conditioned, click on the Mouse icon using the left... oops... right button ... See
also DRAGGING; DRAG'N'DROP; DROP'N'DRAG.

client/server also cis adj. [Often capitalized typographically but under-cap-

italized during the PILOT.] (Of a distributed information ARCHITECTURE) carry-
ing the REMOTE fantasy that there are database systems somewhere on the NET-
WORK sufficiently servile to answer dumb client queries. See also PEER-PEER
NETWORK; INTEROPERABILITY.

=>The much-awaited client/server SILVER BULLET awaits both a standard SQL and suc-
cess with the relatively simpler challenge of retrieving local data from a stand-alone
database. "Whenne Sybase scorned my S-Q-UWho was thenne the Oracle?"
(Heterogenia Joyne, 1543).

close adj. & v. 1 adj. Relating to the nearest possible approach to project
completion. See HARTREE CONSTANT. 2 v. trans. To protect (a file) until the next
OPEN statement. 3 v. intrans. To invoke the "File not open" diagnostic.

closed adj. 1 (Of a fist) showing a complete lack of budgetary imagination,

but prepared to counter accusations of parsimony with pugilistic rebuttal. 2
(Of a shop) Brit.: requiring job-unrelated qualifications. 3 (Of a loop) narcis-
sistic; obsessed with its own parameters. Compare OPEN.

CO- prefix Joint, fellow-.

=>The current dearth of HYPHENS presents us with such eyesores as coauthor, coedu·
cation, and cocitation. Worse: we meet potential ambiguities such as codeified, code·
ceased, and codetermined.

COBOL n. [Origin obscure: possibly from cobble "to botch," whence "A load
of old Cobbolers," or cobbing "a way to punish sailors." Now assumed
acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language.] A procedurally disori-
ented, logorrheic language pioneered by Commander Grace Murray Hopper
of the U.S. Navy. In keeping with naval tradition, a tot of rum is still forced
down the throats of reluctant middy COBOL programmers before they swab
their daily deck of cards. See also LEGACY.
=>Serious attempts are now being made to add classes and objects to COBOL. One
suggested name for this OOPifed version is POSTFIX INCREMENT COBOL BY
ONE.

40
 common language

code v. intrans. To resort, reluctantly, to the CODING phase of the program-

ming cycle. See MURPHY'S LAW OF PROGRAMMING.

code bloat n. The predictable result of paying programmers by the line and
using optimizing compilers with dumb linkers.
~The bloat rate is conveniently measured by plotting the size of "hello, world" pro-
grams since the Kemighan/Ritchie 4-line, 38-character (including WHITE SPACE) hello.c
of 1978. The DLL was introduced specifically to keep the Windows hello.exe within a
2 MB limit. See a/so HELLO. WORLD.

coding n. The setting up of a I-I relationship between ENDLESS LOOPS on a

FLOWCHART and endless loops in a PROGRAM.

cognition n. (cognitive adj.) Phatic embellishments adding interdisciplinary

glamor and expense to the titles of academic journals. Thus: Language and
Cognitive Processes; Cognitive Neuropsychology; Cognition and Emotion;
The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology; Cognition and Instruction;
The Journal of Cognitive Psychosociolinguistics. The Journal of Cognitive
Cognition; The Journal of Cognitive Hydrodynamics; The Journal of
Cognitive Janitorial Methodologies.
COIK adj. [Acronym for Clear Only If Known.] Relating to the growing num-
ber of complex computer topics that have no effective linear pedagogic strat-
egy.
~Bostonian topology offers an analogy:

Lost Driver: "How do I get to Boston Common?"

Helpful Bystander: "Ah, you must start from some other place."

collective noun n. "A singularly euphonious appellation" (W. C. Fields). A

revealing name applied to a class or aggregate, as: "a pride of lexicographers,"
"a doze of profredders." See the table on page 42. See also DATA.

combinatorial explosion n. The result of excessive node expansion, and

the inescapable fate of all nontrivial computer systems unless the neo-
Luddites get them first.

come from n. An instruction proposed by R. Lawrence Clark (1973) to

resolve the GOTO controversy. The industry is still (1995) bristling with acute
disbelief. More at TNHD.

common language n. 1 A language used only by the originator and his or

her closest friends. 2 A grandiose scheme launched by Friden Inc. in the late
19508 to provide a paper-tape Esperanto linking all known data preparation
and processing devices.

41
compeblble

Table of Collective Nouns

Unit number Collective noun(s)

Field engineer An absence of engineers

User A bleat of users or
A jury of users
Manufacturer A dock of manufacturers
DPM A panic of DPMs
Systems analyst An expectation of systems analysts
Programmer A detail of programmers
Operator An indifference of operators
Salesperson A trough of salespersons
Consultant A retreat of consultants
Deadline A sequence of deadlines
Connector A conspiracy of connectors
Dump A gloom of dumps
String A vest of strings
Crash A jangle of crashes
Datum A loss of data
High-level language A logomachy of high-level
languages or
A babol of high-level languages
Competitor A rafter of competitors
Senior COBOL programmer A load of old Cobollers

~In spite of some initial success, the users' intense desire to be different led to a
plethora of incompatible dialects, and the experiment foundered between the Scylla of
three tape widths, two chadic states, five opaquacities, and a whole ferranti of coding
variations, and the Charybdis of IBM's selfish allegiance to the CARD. See also BABOL;
LOW-LEVEL LANGUAGE ••

compatable adj. Also (in archaic systems literature) compatible. Pertaining

to a supposed relationship between a given set of existing characteristics
(known as the "installed set") and a mooted, nonexisting set (known as the
"proposed set").
~urrent DP usage allows a variety of colorful qualifications to the basic concept of
compatability, including many adverbs of motion, e.g., upward, downward, sideways,
recessively. Degrees of compatability are rated I to lOon the Richter scale, but the
measurement, so far, lacks solid scientific objectivity. For example, when the supplier
of the proposed set is a competitor of the supplier of the installed set, the two suppli-
ers' assessments have been known to differ by as much as nine Richter points. Many
experienced upgraders, in fact, are opposed to any partial qualifications of the predi-
cate, such as "almost compatable," "as good as compatable," "compatable except on a

42
 Compton eff8et

set of measure zero," and so on. The side effects of near "compatability," they claim,
are infinitely more horrendous than those of total inconsistency.

compatible adj. Chiefly archaic spelling of COMPATABLE.

~Beware of the compatible variant, which indicates that the proposal was written by
non-DP staff.

complier n. [Possibly from Latin compi/atio "pillaging," whence, contemp-

tuously, "the act of gathering together documents" (Cicero); related to Latin
compi/are, "to pack up and take off."] 1 An instance of the SIGO principle
(Source In Garbage Out). 2 The coder's bouc emissaire. 3 A program that,
having successfully compiled itself, presumes to know more about its lan-
guage than the programmer. See also YACC; INTERPRETER; PESSIMIZER.

compile-time 1 adj. (Of a binding) premature. 2 n. A useful, recurring break

for meals between coding. See also BINDING TIME.

complex n. & adj. 1 n. Any system, subsystem, sub-subsystem, etc., which

is priced as a separate item in a proposal, as: "The head office 6 x 4-1100 will
be in a real-time on-line situation with each branch. The branch-office com-
plex comprises I (one) teleprinter and modem." 2 adj. (Of a OP problem)
resolvable into two parts: a real part that can be solved or shelved, and an
imaginary part that requires a complete and immediate restructuring of the OP
department.

compliance n. (compliant adj.) A state of compatibility claimed before the

standard has been established.
~The adjectival form is often seen in forms generated from the TEMPLATE X-compli-
ant. Popular values of X are "SAA," "POSIX," "IDAPI," and, of course, "X." The fol-
lowing advert mayor may not contain a typo:
••...featuring integrated IBM's SAA-complaint SQL ... (800-Software,
Computer Currents, March 10, 1992).

compliment v. [Common OP usage.] Synonym for "complement," as in 'The

interface must compliment the system" (SIGSOFf SEN, April 1993). If taken
literally, perhaps we should try printf ("Hello, pretty system");

comprise v. trans.(?) and/or intrans.(?) (Mandatory OP usage) to consist:

'The system comprises of the following items;" "the system is comprised
with the following items."

~Beware of proposals using the archaic phrasal verb consist of Compare COMPATIBLE.

Compton effect n. The hypocritical reaction of giant patent-rich companies

to the CD-ROM patent gained by tiny Compton's New Media.

43
computable

computable adj. Chiefly archaic spelling of computible. Compare COMPAT-

ABLE; COMPRISE.

~ The theoretical foundations of "computability" were exhausted by Thring and oth-

ers in the midllate 1930s and might have remained as a branch of pure mathematics
had not Hitler challenged the military strength of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and
Princeton. From 1938 to 1946, the ~-recursive function was armed with sticky relays,
glowing tubes, dry joints, and mercurious delay lines to implement the still undersung
Win World War II package. Fascism, having alienated the best programmers, could not
match the Allied ballistic, nuclear, logistic, and, perhaps of most value, cryptanalytic
computational resources. (See Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War, McGraw-Hili, New
York, 1978.) Lest we forget ... when you next run StarTrader, Hammurabi, or Battleship
on your playful inhouse system, spare a thought for those who computed a real war,
and won: Atanasoff, Bigelow, Churchhouse, J. P. Eckert, W. 1. Eckert, Einstein, Fermi,
Feynman, Goldstine, Mauchly, Newman, Oppenheimer, Telford, Turing, U1am, von
Neumann, WeIchmann ...

computer book n. & adj. A burgeoning market that stretches the definition
of both words. See also COIK; LOW SELF-ESTEEM BOOKS; WORN; ZERO KNOWL-
EDGE.

~Every computer book has a mandatory TARGET AUDIENCE prolegomenon. For exam-
ple, the IBM OS/2 2.1 manual "Using the Operating System" starts with a section
headed "Who Should Read This Book?" All agog, you then read: "Anyone who will
be using OS/2 2.1 should read this book." "Wow, 'struth, you don't say, blow me," and
similar (possibly) phatic expressions. But before you can discard the document, your
eye catches the following imperious notice: "Keep this book as a reference."

computer Journalist n. Also called calumnist. A programmer or systems

analyst lured into the tabloid cesspool with false promises of shorter hours,
better pay, and less attention to detail. The unsatisfied craving for an audience
often leads to an early return to the former honest labors.
computer music n. 1 The sudden burst of silence when you switc)1 off. 2
Any polyhedral, non-celestial approximation to spherical harmonics. See also
SAWTEETH.

computer science n. [Origin: possibly Prof. P. B. Fellget's rhetorical ques-

tion, "Is computer science?"] 1A study akin to numerology and astrology, but
lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter. 2 The pro-
tracted value analysis of algorithms. 3 The costly enumeration of the obvious.
4 The boring art of coping with a large number of trivialities. 5 Tautology har-
nessed in the service of Man at the speed of light. 6 The Post-Turing decline
in formal systems theory. "Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics
is to plumbing" (Prof. M. Thump). Compare COMPUTING SCIENCE.

44
 conjecture

=>The only universally accepted computer scientific theorem to emerge, so far, is my

own rather depressing:
Theorem: All programs are dull.
Proof: Assume the contrary; i.e., the set of interesting programs is nonempty.
Arrange them (or it) in order of interest (note that all sets can be well ordered, so
do it properly). The minimal element is the least interesting program, the obvious
dullness of which provides the contradictory denouement we so devoutly seek.
Some plagiarists have tried to reverse this argument to show that all programs are inter-
esting, but all they actually prove is that there exists a least dull program. This I am
willing to accept, since I wrote it in 1954-and I can assure you that it is no longer of
any interest to me or anyone.
Computer Science in 1995 still reminds one of Ancient Egyptian Mensuration, cop-
ing quite well on a day-by-day, ad hoc, problem-solving basis, yet waiting for
Geometry to happen. We have our Thales's and Pytheas's go leor, even the odd
Pythagoras... but where is Euclid or Euclidea hiding?

computlble adj. Also (in archaic systems literature) computable. (Of a

function) listed, or claimed to be listed, in any extant manufacturer's catalog
of available software.
computing science n. The Hoare-Dijkstra-Gries apostate church that sen-
sibly ensures software reliability by delaying execution indefinitely, or until
program correctness is proved off-line, whichever is sooner. The enormous
effort and subsequent feeling of intellectual superiority in establishing cor-
rectness is known as the Dijkstra invariant. The COMPUTER SCIENCE jiffy-
lubers, by contrast, converge with painful iterations to a dubious correctness
at the whim of unproven chips and compilers. See also SOFTWARE ENGINEER-
ING.

congress n. [From Latin com "together" + gradatio "climax" or Sanskrit

(Kama Sutra) "intercourse between Indians of disparate endowments."] A
wild CONVENTION.

conjecture n. 1Mathematics A hypothesis in search of a counterexample.

Once united, they marry, moved to the suburbs, raise a few boring lemmata,
and are never heard of again.
=>Some conjectures, alas, seem doomed to sail forever seeking conjugal resolution,
allowed to come ashore but once a year. They anchor briefly near the Martin Gardner
strands until the smooth rabble drives them out to sea.

2 Data Processing The firm, irrevocable, notarized pledge, sworn on the grave
of one or both of the programmer's putative parents, that the job will run on
time (excluding any delays caused or enhanced by war, civil commotion, or

45
connectionism

rioting, whether declared. spontaneous, reprehensible, or justified; undue

pressure to perfonn, from whatsoever source: mal de mer, mal de pays, mal
de siecle, mal de code, mal de machine, or any force majeure not pretofore
invoked).
~Embarrassed with a daily richness of firm conjectures, the DPM is left with a pleas-
antly selective task known as scheduling.

connectionism n. Also called The Connectionist Conspiracy. The theory

that for NEURAL network and MASSIVELY PARALLEL funding it's whom you
know at DARPA rather than the merits of your proposals.

Connector Conspiracy, The n. A shadowy ECZEMA, ISO, and llluminati

plot to destroy civilization by randomly varying the size, shape, pin-assign-
ments, and gender of all known plugs. See also WHEEL.
~ "Alas, the dazed democracies
Respond with muted DIN."
(V. Hampden)

console n. [From Latin consolatio(n) "comfort, spiritual solace."] A device

for displaying or printing condolences and obituaries for the OPERATOR.
~ Randomly accessed my girl is delirious;
I even consoled her one night on the Sirius;
The Monitor printer did then overswing;
It took away one of my favorite things!
const n. & adj. [Origin: a constant source of vituperation between rival C++
gurus.] Keyword qualifying certain tokens as "constant" (read-only) or
restricting the actions of functions.
~The delicate placement of canst determines, inter alia, whether you have a con-
stant object, a constant pointer to a variable object, a variable pointer to a constant
object, or whatever-RTFM.

constructor n. (c++) The eponymous member function that creates and ini-
tializes instances of its CLASS. See also OBJECI'.

consultant n. [From con "to fraud, dupe, swindle," or, possibly, French con
(vulgar) "a person of little merit" + suIt elliptical fonn of "insult."] A tipster
disguised as an oracle, esp. one who has learned to decamp at high speed in
spite of the large briefcase and heavy wallet.
~The earliest literary reference appears to be the ninth-century Arabic tale AU Baba
and the Forty Consultants.

46
 CR

convention n. [From Latin convenire "to come together."] An alibi; saturna-

lia; a gathering held at a safe distance from one's family; a place where nor-
mal behavioral conventions are suspended. See also CONGRESS; SYMPOSIUM.

conversion n. [From Latin conversare "to turn around frequently."] The reg-
ular, major recasting of one's software and databases to avoid the stigma of
OBSOLESCENCE. See also UPGRADE.

copy rlghtl imperative Unheeded warning to check whether COpy A B,

MOV A, B, A=B, and so on, overwrites B or A.

copyleft n. [Playful antonym of COPYRIGHT coined by the Free Software

Foundation.] A chain-letter urging you to copy and distribute the attached
software free of charge to ten acquaintances together with a copy of the chain-
letter. Breaking the chain, they warn, will lead to the downfall of the Soviet
Union and victory for the howling jackals of Wall Street. More in TNHD at GPL;
GENERAL PUBLIC VIRUS.

copyright n. The presumptuous and self-defeating boast that the attached

work has INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES worth stealing. See also COPYLEFI'; TRADE-
MARK; PATENT.

::)One can detect an analogy with the Decalogue, often viewed as the sinner's sugges-
tive do-list: "Covet my neighbor's ass? Now you mention it..,"

core technology n. 1 The attic of old memories. 2 The latest gadgetry with-
out which all progress stops instanter. See also AUTO-ANTONYM.

correctrlce n. [Feminine form of French correcteur "profredder."] A French

preuf reeader with MIDDLEWARE and DYSLEXIA.

cpm n. [Charlatans Per Minute.] Queuing theory The arrival rate of salesper-
sons, indicating the number of mailing lists to which the visitee has been
exposed.

CPU n. [Chiefly archaic abbreviation for Central Processing Unit.] The cal-
culating mill that Babbage dreamed on.
::)The dream was eventually realized in the 19508, but is now being replaced by a dif-
fused continuum of minute noncomputing elements known as MICROPROCESSORS.

CR (Carriage Return) n. An ARCHAISM harking back to the days when print-

ers had moving carriages. Now the ASCII code 13 indicating the end of a line.
Compare LF (Line Feed).
~Many a fine manual devotes an early chapter to the confusing key top equation, CR
= Enter.

47
cl'llcker

cracker n. A computer-intruder, esp. one who knows your wife's first name;
a HACKER manque. More at TNHD.
=> "If only they had used their terminals for niceness instead of evil" (Maxwell Smart).

crank n. & v. trans. 1 n. An incorrigible FLT prover, circle squarer, or angle

trisector as tabulated by Woody Dudley (Mathematical Cranks, Underwood
Dudley, Spectrum Series, The Mathematical Association of America,
Washington, D.C., 1992).2 v. trans. To churn out (results) mechanically with-
out thought, as on a PENTIUM.
crash n. & v. 1 n. Software An audible warning that it's DOWNTIME time again.

=>In excessively unstable environments the warnings combine to give the illusion of a
continuous tone, e.g., middle C for Exec 8, Ab above middle C for OSI360, and so on,
but cases have been reported in which the human audio range has been exceeded.
Some Chronos II sites have specially trained watchdogs to alert the operator. The leg-
endary St. Paul Breakpointer, it is claimed, not only whines suggestively before the
system dies, but also points at the offending line of code.

2 n. Hardware The distinctive sound made by drums and disks when heads
drop.
=>Head crashes serve to resolve fundamental problems in maintaining dynamic equi-
librium while the head is aquaplaning over the ill-defined magnetic oxide impurities
that sometimes accumulate on the drum or disk surface. These rustlike layers are not
intrinsically harmful-indeed, some claim that they actually protect the costly metal
below-but they can acquire spurious. palimpsestuous images, known variously as
tracks, sectors, or records. If the normal head burnishing action fails to correct these
aberrations, a head crash is initiated, signaled by a triumphant rasp (the French call it
"un pet de soulagement"). Well-designed drum/disk subsystems will demagnetize the
surface before removing the fetid strata. Many variants are available: read after crash,
crash before write, crash after crash, etc.

3 v. trans. To put down (a system or device). 4 v. intrans. (Of people) to lapse

suddenly into a state of intense abulia, esp. at vital moments during a highly
structured walk-through.
=>1Ypical crash triggers are voices (including your own) announcing that (I) "We now
need to look at the OMS sub-sub-subschema definitions;" (2) "When I took over the
payroll package maintenance responsibility 12 years ago ...••

creative adj. (Of an accounting system) devious, dishonest, sleazy, illegal.

See also SPREADSHEET.
Creed n. A very early, dogmatic teleprinter.

48
 cursor

~When they put the Apostles' Creed in,

lt was soon replaced by Friden;
St. Peter has the system well in hand;
There's a name tape sent from Hell
In the ATR as well,
Typing letters of condolence to the Damned.

CRT n. [Cathode Ray Thbe.] Originally an important storage device, devel-

oped by Prof. F.C. Williams, Manchester University, in 1947, but now rele-
gated to trivial applications in the timesharing and entertainment environ-
ments. See also GLASS TIY.

CRUD n. [Acronym for Create-Read-Update-Delete.] The four basic threats

to database integrity, leading to the eponymous state.

CIS See CLIENT/SERVER.

CS See COMPUTER SCIENCE; COMPUTING SCIENCE.

cult n. A group of devoted language supporters such as the BN (Branch

Negative) Davidian Assemblers of God.

curry v. trans. See SCHOENFINKEL; LAMBDA CALCULUS.

cursor n. [Possibly Old Irish cursagim "to blame" or English cursory "rapid,
superficial,"] A faintly flickering symbol on a CRT screen, used to test the
eyesight and reflexes of the operator, and indicating where the next keyed
character will be rejected.
~In parts of England, frustrated terminal minders often refer to the blinking cursor. A
cursor in the top left hand position of an otherwise blank screen serves to indicate that
the system (with the exception of the cursor-generation module) is inoperative. In well-
designed systems the cursor flicker rate is set to match the operator's alpha brain
rhythm to provide an inescapably hypnotic point of interest until normal service is
resumed.
The record for loyal patience belongs to the late M. Thumps, whose atrophied
corpse was discovered slumped over a remote terminal of the British Rail TRAIN
(Train Recovery And Identification Network») complex two years after his particular
line had been closed. The postmortem, performed by Terminal Diseases Inc., proudly
revealed that the cursor was still flashing, a fact subsequently exploited in the manu-
facturer's gruesomely effective advertising campaign. Who will want to forget the full-
page picture of the remains of Mr. Thumps's index finger, pitifully poised above the
GO key? TOPE (the Terminal OPerators' Executive) has converted Signal Box 327,
Camden Town, London, into a permanent museum-shrine in honor of Micky Thumps.
A blue plaque outside bears the epitaph:

3. Initiated following the Great Train Robbery of 1895 but not fully operational until after the
Great Train Robbery of 1963.

49
cursor address

Young Mick stood by the empty screen

Whence all but he had fled;
In vain he waited for response,
Now, like the line, he's dead.

Inside, a tastefully cobwebbed replica of Thumps's putrified cadaver, erected by pub-

lic subscription, can be seen seated at the silent, inexorable CRT, symbolizing the stub-
born, pigheaded pride of the timesharer whom time has passed by. Inserting a coin of
modest denomination into an adjacent slot, the pilgrim is rewarded with a macabre
reenactment of Thumps's final attempt to log on. Bony fingertips scratch the key tops,
the cursor blinks but does not move, and a crescendo of bleeps drowns poor Thumps's
last modest screams of despair.

cursor address n. "Hello, cursor!"

curtatlon n. The enforced compression of a string in the fixed-length field
environment.
~The problem of fitting extremely variable-length strings such as names, addresses,
and item descriptions into fixed-length records is no trivial matter. Neglect of the sub-
tle art of curtation has probably alienated more people than any other aspect of data
processing. You order Mozart's Don Giovanni from your record club, and they invoice
you $24.95 for MOZ DONG. The witless mapping of the sublime onto the ridiculous!
WHY I DO turns out to be Bertrand Russell's Why / do not believe in Christianity.
Equally puzzling is the curtation that produces the same eight characters: THE BEST,
whether you order The Best of Wagner, The Best of Schubert, or The Best of the Turds.
Similarly, wine lovers buying from computerized wineries twirl their glasses, check
their delivery notes, and inform their friends, "A rather innocent, possibly overtrun-
cated CAB SAUV 69 TAL." The squeezing of fruit into 10 columns has yielded such
memorable obscenities as COX OR PIP.
The examples cited are real, and the curtational methodology which produced them
is still with us. Compare TRUNCATE.

eyc n. \pronounced psyche.\ A complete 00 database of commonsensical

human knowledge started in 1984 at MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club?) by
Lenat, Guha, Pittman, Pratt, and Shepherd with funding from several major
computer companies. The BASE CLASS is called Thing.
~Cyc may be faced with the Tristram Shandy syndrome (it took TS a week to write
up each day of his autobiography). As the growth of human knowledge outpaces that
of the Cyc input and maintenance team, it may be necessary to restrict the database to
universal consensus facts, which are known to decline as time goes by. When I last
checked, Cyc "knew" it was unusual to offer a $100 bill for a Baskin-Robbins vanilla
cone, but there was no reaction when I sang "You scream, I scream ... "

50
D
daemon n. \pronounced day-mon\ One of many puckish processes raising
merrie hell in the bowels of UNIX.

~ The DE spelling, by tradition, distinguishes the relatively benign d4emon from the
downright evil demon. The spooler daemon, for example, delights in sending your high
priority reports to a paper-low printer, whereas the spooler demon prefers to direct all
your print requests to a non-existent DIABLO at a remote site. PC UNIX considers both
daemon and demon to be offensive to many religious groups and mandates the use of
SPIRIT GUIDE or CHANNELER.
Dal Graff (1929-) Welsh linguist and croesair (crossword) composer, best
known for allowing eponymous pairs of letters in a single square, namely ch,
dd, if, ng, 11,ph, rh, and tho

Daisy Chain or Cha'n (1831-1895) Legendary Bangkok prostitute-inven-

tor who developed and gave her name to several anachronistic communica-
tions and printing devices.
~She left for the United States in 1879 ("breaking all my Thais," as she put it) and
became Herman Hollerith's mistress-assistant at the Census Office. She died there in
1895 during an all-night card-joggling session. Her son, Markov, took his mother's
surname, but did not inherit her practical, electro-mechanical skills. However, Markov
soon showed signs of genius as a pure mathematician, and his pioneering work in the
theory of stochastic processes probably helped Dr. Hollerith more than any of his
mother's futuristic peripherals. Mystery surrounds the fate of Markov Chain. His
evening walks became more and more erratic, and one night he simply failed to come
home.
Dr. Hollerith tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate Daisy's ideas into his hardware.
Her line printer called for a horizontally rotating band on which were set, at regular
intervals, 80 small windmill-like devices, free to spin a vertical plane, each carrying 96
printing elements, one at each tip of the windmill's vanes. Hollerith spent five years
digesting the previous sentence, and a further five on the inertial and timing problems
of his prototype. Although he never broke the I line per minute barrier, he accidental-
ly-some 20 years before Sikorsky-built a two-ton monster that could hover six inch-
es above floor level. Dr. Hollerith's dying words, in 1929, were ''On mein Hen you
viii find ze werd, Gilnsebliimchenketterdrucker."

Dangling Else [Posthumous hypocorism for Elsie Batch (1940-1974).]

~A pioneer Pascal blaise-trailer who committed suicide after a particularly frustrat-
ing session with her primitive compiler. Her ghost is reputed to lurk yet around the
computer room at North Staffs Polytechnic (Staffordshire, England), where her venge-
ful spirit is blamed for any otherwise unaccountable system crash. Her tombstone in
the Shrewsbury Bone Orchard bears the following salutary epitaph:

51
DARPA

=> "Poor Dangling Else!," her fellow users cried;

To cut her down and vet her source they tried.
"IF only she had DOUBLE-checked," they whooped,
"Her neck wOldd not be unconditionally looped!
"Her once soft eyes would not be swollen
"ELSE had she spied the missing semicolon!
"Her time shared lips would still be smiling;
"Alas, she now lies decompiling!"

Dear Pascal users who pass by,

o PAUSE a WHILE, and heed my cry.
No ARGUMENT can bring me back
And without Wirth, true Worth I lack!
My tragic CASE should make AMEND;
BEGIN a-NEW, avoid my END!

FOR careless coding in the young

Can leave a program, and a body, HUNG!

DARPA See ARPA.

data n. [Latin dare "to offer or give:' whence datum "that which is offered or
given."] The singular collective noun for a set of datums.
=>Mandatory DP usage has data in the singular, without exception: "The data is
punched and verified." The singularity of data is powerful enough to override preced-
ing pluralities, as: "Ten thousand cards of data is punched and verified." Proposals or
documents with such flashy affectations as, "Having been punched, the data are veri-
fied," are invariably dismissed as the work of pettifogging technical writers who
wouldn't know a data if they tripped over one. Similar pitfalls exist in the spoken envi-
ronment, although the rules are more flexible. The choice between darter, dayter, and
datter (rarely darrer) will depend, in a most subtle manner, on the longitude of the
speaker and the latitude of the audience. The received classical phonetic canon indi-
cates the shortest vowel, but there are many gaps in our knowledge of Roman com-
puting practice. When in doubt, a safe alternative pronunciation is in-form-ay-shun.
provided that you are not addressing a convention of full-time semanticists. The latter
incline to the view that information is that which is left after data has been processed,
but the practical computerperson cannot afford to be so pessimistic.
A more fundamental attack on the validity of data, as used by the DP industry, has
come recently from the eminent Scandinavian etymologist, Prof. M. Thumpersen.
Thumpersen argues that computer science, being new, undisciplined, and lacking any
widely accepted central authority in charge of nomenclature, has borrowed naively
from other, more precise taxonomies. He claims, in particular, that the key word data
is a grotesque misnomer, since computer data is never "given" and seldom "offered."
Thumpersen urges a move to the more appropriate (capio. capere. cepi, captum) roots,
i.e., a switch from the "giving" implied by data to the "taking" suggested by capta. To
encourage the adoption of such phrases as capta entry, capta processing, captabase.

52
 debugging

and Capta General Inc., he is prepared to accept that capta is treated as a singular
noun. "It would be unrealistic," Thumpersen explains, "to expect too dramatic a
change in CP usage."
data bank n. A place where DATAcan be deposited with the traditional secu-
rity associated with financial institutions, such as Equity Funding Corporation
of America, lOS, Franklyn National, and BCCI, not to mention the many
rock-solid S&Ls.
~Data bank interest can vary, but usually peaks at the moment of retrieval. As with
coitus interruptus, there are substantial penalties for late withdrawal.
data hiding n. See HIDING,DATA.

data typing n. 1 (YO) The dominant, depressing DP activity that has defied
automation. See also SWEATSHOP. 2 (Computer Languages) A putative safety
mechanism protecting variables from straying out of bounds.
~Alas, many data-typing schemes can be circumvented by internal, implicit DEMO-
TIONSand PROMOTIONS, or CASTaway by explicit coding.
Database Management System n. Also DBMS. [Origin: DATA+ Latin
basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, counterfeit."] 1 Marketing Any fil-
ing system. 2 Software A complex set of interrelational data structures, allow-
ing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete
record of the logical relations between the missing items. See also RELATION-
ALDATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.
DBMS n. See DATABASE
MANAGEMENT
SYSTEM.
deadline n. 1 Communications A NAcKered line that rejects all handshakes,
however friendly. 2 Scheduling One of a sequence of vague prophecies; a
given date before which assignments must not be completed. See also
HARTREE CONSTANT; REDUNDANCY.
DEBE n. [Acronym for Does Everything But Eat.] Supersoft Inc. (ca. 1980)
An early example of blatant FEATURISM.
debugger n. (Anglo-Irish) The person responsible for errors in a program;
the person who sold us our system.
debugging n. Removing a BUG,either by tinkering with the program or by
amending the program specification so that the side effect of the bug is pub-
lished as a desirable feature. See also KLUDGE;ONE-LINEPATCH;STEPWISE
REFINEMENT .
~Fixing one's own errors is such a hazardous and humiliating process that program-
mers are well advised to observe the Kelly-BootIeRule: "Avoiddebugging! Get it right

53
DEe

the first time!" Correcting the work of others. though. has its lighter moments, for it is
difficult to suppress the occasional wry chuckle (pronounced Yahoo!) as your col-
league's blatant howlers are methodically exposed and neady patched. See YOURPRO-
GRAM.

DEe Overloaded abbrev. December; deceased; decrease; decrement; pour off

(prescriptions); decrescendo (music); Digital Engineering Corporation.
Warning Often resists contextual disambiguation.

decade counter n. A slow real-time clock used in automated news media

offices. Every 10 years a signal is generated to initiate a spate of retrospection
and prediction.
~The best known example. perhaps. is JANUS (JANuary Updating Service). which pro-
vides an annual subpulse. This trigger creates a hierarchical database of the previous
year's nonevents and a selection of the more idle speculations on the year to come. The
100year (or decadent) clock pulse invokes a complex collation of the previous files
from which the presses and TV cameras can roll out the spiritual distillation of the (n
x lO)'s.

decision table n. 1A choice between the noise of the cabaret and the smell
of the kitchen. 2 A noncomputable variant of tic-tac-toe.

declaration n. A cavalier statement made to a compiler or customs official.

decompiler n. 1(Brooklyn English) the compiler. 2 The software needed to
undo the wrongs of compilation, i.e., to repack object worms in a can of
source.

decomplllng, James Joyce's Law of "What's source for the goose is

object for the gander."

deconstructor n. (C+-) The special member function of a class X named

--X.

~Unlike the traditional c++ x: :-x DESTRUcroR. which destroys target objects imme-
diately, the c+- deconstructor first engages the memory management system in a pro-
longed, acrimonious polemic. questioning the naive assumption that ooP "languages"
can "model" the "real" world.

default n. [Possibly from Black English Vernacular "De fault wid dis system
is you, man."] 1The vain attempts to avoid errors by inactivity. "Nothing will
come of nothing: speak again" (King Lear). 2 Default option. A soft option.
~The default option is always worth a try when in doubt. The system tries to guess
what you really want. and, even if it guesses wrong. at least the whole transaction is
legal syntactically. Furthermore. you have a credible scapegoat. which, nowadays, is
sure hard to find.

54
 depilation

defuzzlflcatlon n. The final stage when a FUZZYsystem is more or less

forced off the fence, the rubber meets the road, and the FUZZhits the fan.

degrade v. trans. 1 To add a terminal to (a timesharing system). 2 To pro-

mote (a programmer) to systems analyst.

delay n. 1 The elapsed time between successive deadlines. 2 A period of frus-

trating inactivity so fatal in all its consequences that no member of the DP
community can relax until every single manifestation has been tracked down,
identified, and stored in the pending file. Compare PAUSE.See also CAD.
delay-line storage n. (ca. 1948) An ecologically sound memory system
using recycled pulses. The Cambridge EDSAC I, for example, employed
acoustic pulses circulating in long tanks of mercury.
~The term "delay-line," of course, was a marketing fiasco. As a general rule, com-
puter products should avoid names that hint, however remotely, that instant gratifica-
tion is not a key FUNCflONALITY. Repackaging under the name Green Mercurial
Memory and miniaturizing with discarded clinical thermometers might yet bring back
this wonderful device.

demotion n. 1 The announcement that an ousted CEO is being retained as a

consultant at a higher salary. This is a strong indication that the toppled exec-
utive could not think of any "personal interests" worth "pursuing." 2 CAsTing
an iot to a char. Compare PROMOfION.

denier n. [Origin: possibly French denier "to refuse to recognize."] A pro-

posed unit of coarseness which has yet to gain ISO! ASCII approval.

~The measure assigns zero to the NULL STRING, one to the benign strings (such as
"God bless you," "Slainte," etc.), and infinity to any string containing******.

depilation n. [Latin de "away" + pilus "hair."] The painful process whereby

programs are made less HAIRY.
~A DP trickopathist writes: "One of life's most enduring and remunerative paradox-
es is that, for every patient I have complaining of a superfluity in the trichoid environ-
ment, I can cite and bill another with the contrary affliction. Hair, or the lack of it, it
seems, always looks greener on the other side. Some programmers worry unduly when
their programs become more hairy in spite of long sessions aimed at simplification. We
in the trade call this the "the third-shift shadow" problem. I advise such patients,
regardless of sex, to relax, step aside from the job, retire to bed with a cheap novel, and
sip my guaranteed medication. There are some horripilations, of course, beyond the
grasp of trickopathy, and for those in a seriously deep trichoma we can do little more
than find a scapegoat and a change of scenery.

"Hair deficiency, on the other hand or chest, can always be remedied, either by natur-
al methods (usually by a fresh, more realistic assessment of the problem to be pro-

55
dentference

grammed) or by artificial complexifications. The latter techniques range from the

grafting of hair to hide any thin patches of triviality, to the fitting of a global program
toupee able to give to the most mundane package unimpeachable profundity and
daunting opaqueness. A full refund is made if anyone spots the join!"

dereference v. To trace, with increasing horror, the ultimate object (also

called the POINTEE) being pointed at by a chain of linked POINTERS. See also
INDIRECTION; REFERENCE.

~In C++, the simple rule is: reference by adding an & and dereference by removing
an *.
(Ask Bruce Eckel for the rest of the story.)

desktop adj. (Of a metaphor) relating to the inane, GRAND GUIGNOL mapping
of a windowed computer screen to the untesselatable 3-D chaos of your real
desktop.
~Current usage indicates that "simile" is a more accurate term for the GUI desktop.
However, it seems that metaphoric paradigms are more marketable than mere simili-
tudes (look what happened to Simile 67). Disk directories and files are certainly "like"
filing cabinet drawers and folders, and some thereby justify the subsequent predomi-
nant iconography. The problem now, though, is explaining to the class of '95 exactly
what a filing cabinet is (not to mention, Where On Earth Is Manila?). After you have
described the metal boxes, sliding compartments, access to paper by indexed tags, and
the rest, the kids of today say, "Oh, you mean like a hard disk with directories and
files?"
Virtual Reality purists point out that a screen truly reflecting your desktop would
surely display the most prominent object thereon, namely your desktop computer with
its screen truly reflecting your desktop ...

destructor n. (C++) The lonely serial killer lurking among the member
functions of each class. "Whatsoever Bjarne giveth, Bjarne taketh away" (St.
Bernard d'Eiffel). "Out of scope, out of heap" (Sean Bootstrap, Irish Business
Machines).
~DP usage dithers between "X::-X destroys" and "X::-X destructs." However, the
Oxford American Dictionary warns that "Careful writers use the verb destroy and the
noun destruction except when referring to rockets and military devices." See also TEM-
PORARY; DECONSTRUCfOR.

Diablo n. A devilish slow serial printer. See also DAEMON.

diagnostic n. A person who doubts the existence of two gods.

dialog box n. (GUI) An inquisitive window that, if MODAL, demands an
answer. Modeless dialog boxes can be ignored but you might as well click OK
to keep them happy.

56
 dismal

~ Yet another unproductive element in the GUI canon. What started as a simple input
prompt has tsunamied into a time-wasting conflict between data-entry fingers and
mousing hands. One is tempted to blame the many Windows interface building pack-
ages that encourage the programmer to add just one more effortless control button to
the dialog box.

digital recording n. My dramatic reading of 1t to 3,000 decimal places

(PYE Records, Cambridge, England).
~The adventurous may prefer the hard-to-find Lithuanian Pi-recital (200 wax cylin-
ders on the LithPhon label).

Dljkstra, E. W. Versatile computing scientist and baseball star. See also COM-
PUTING SCIENCE.

~ To confuse the taxman, he spells his name Dykstra when playing center field for the
Phillies.

Dinosaurs n. A CD-ROMpackage from Microsoft containing DOS 4.0 and

Windows 1.0.

disability n. (pc) A hidden or euphemised deficiency.

~Thus 8080 SEGMENTED memory is "address-challenged." Similarly, an employer can
no longer ask job-seekers if they are addicted to alcohol, absenteeism, or BASIC.

disambiguation n. That which contains ambiguities.

~Inspiration for this wordplay comes from a real anti-virus program that proclaims:
'This package contains viruses."

disclaimer n. A message of dubious legality attached to a SHRINK-WRAPped

software package confirming the user's fears that the contents are unsuited to
the implied, or any, purpose. Compare disowner as in "Valid except where
invalid." See also AS IS.
~Thus a box labeled Eezi-Akkounting carries the waming: "Notwithstanding the
product name and the contents of the manual, it must not be construed that accounting
procedures are easy, or indeed possible, by executing the enclosed programs on your
past, present or future hardware configurations."

dismal adj. [Origin: malapropistic transformation of decimal "pertaining to

or founded on the number 10."] 1 Currency Boring; lacking the traditional,
sterling, and natural basal variety of a mixed duodecimal and vicenary mone-
tary system. 2 Adders Not quite reliable: "In fact, we dubbed it the "dismal"
adder because of its proximity to the edge of workability" (Herman Lukoff,
From Dits to Bits, Robotics Press, 1979).

57
disquotational

dlsquotatlonal adj. (Of Tarski's concept of "truth" in formalized languages)

true. See also QUOTES.
=:>More precisely, "Tarski is right" if and only ifTarski is right. And I happen to know
that Tarski is right. You can quote me on that. Niema za co! Less fonnally, the Bourne
and other UNIX shells daily face the disquotational challenge. A host of METACHAR-
ACI'ERS impact the shell in diverse ways unless they are quoted or escaped, Le., made
to behave literally. Thus, cat is a command but "cat" is a feline string. SPACE PRE-
CLUDES a full exegesis ...

documentation n. [Latin docomentum "warning."] 1 The promised litera-

ture that fails to arrive with the supporting hardware. 2 A single, illegible,
photocopied page of proprietary caveats and suggested infractions. 3 The
detailed, unindexed description of a superseded package. See also DOXOLOOY;
RTEM.

=:>"Documentation is like the weather-everyone talks about it but nobody does any-
thing about it" (Michael Marcotty).

dope n. The Philosopher's Stone of electronic alchemy.

=:>Cynics have noted the cussedness of 20th-century alchemy, in which a deliberate
impurity (or fix) transmutes pure silicon into base transistors.

doryphore n. [Greek doru "lance" + pherein "to carry." Whence "spear car-
rier," whence suborder of Coleoptera, whence "nit-picker."] One who takes
excessive delight in spotting small errors. See also LINT.

DOS n. A series of fatal PC VIRUsesdistributed by MICROSOFf.Also called MS-

DOS.
=:>Warning: most Pes now arrive pre-infected.

D08-2evsky n. An early Russian version of DOSgenerally believed to have

been a leading factor in the Evil Empire's downfall.

DOS for Dummies See LOW-SELf-ESTEEM

BOOKS.

DOSKEY n. \pronounced .n:oc~HH\ Pirated version of DOS 4.0 available on

the Arbat for 100 roubles (2 sold since 1990).

double-sided drum n. [© Irish Business Machines.] A discontinued device

aimed at storing data on both surfaces of a hollow cylinder. The increase in
storage capacity was vitiated by the disastrous reduction in angular momen-
tum. Compare FASTRAND.

down n. [From Old Norse dunn "the soft plumage of a seabird's tits,"
whence, a feather bed."] Moving from an upright, operational, busy, and bor-
ing posture to one of horizontal relaxation. Compare UP.

58
 DPfnlud

downsize v. intrans.& v. trans. See RIGIITSIZE.

downtime n. The period during which a system is error-free and immune

from user input. Compare UPTIME. See also CRASH.

doxology n. (Rare) a hymn of praise for the technical writer.

DP attorney n. An attorney whose own law firm has not yet computerized,
and who is therefore able to exude a proper and expensive objectivity when
faced with the tiresome loops of litigation between user and manufacturer.
=>Until juries are selected by technical rather than common-sense qualifications, a
heavy burden rests on the attorneys involved in complex OP actions. There is little
point in the aspiring Perry Mason yelling at the jury: ''1bis so-called programmer,
cowering in the dock behind a patently false beard, would have you believe that, on the
night of the 25th, when all the operators were in the rest rooms and he alone was at the
console, that my client's widely respected operating system suddenly and without pre-
meditation killed Job 148, a harmless FORTRAN background batch routine that had
been idly ticking over for 18 hours at least. Need I remind you, sweet members, that
Job 148 has run regularly each week for 25 years, taking, typically, 19.6 hours with no
observable degradation of the timesharing service? Exhibits 23 through 7856, showing
the relevant operator log sheets since September 1965, can leave you in no doubt about
this. The plaintiff's absurd counter that the log for December 24, 1990, is missing is a
despicable red herring underlining the poverty of his submission. Why, then, I pray,
would Job 148 on this fateful night be aborted by the system? You have no doubt stud-
ied Exhibits I through 5, the basic documentation of my client's os. In any of the nine
hundred pages, I ask, is there the remotest sign of instability, the merest suspicion of
nonresolvable contlict between batch and timesharing resource allocation? Who had
the most to gain from the untimely demise of Job 148? I direct your attention, mem-
bers of the jury, to exhibits 7857 through 12,345, the actual, unarguable hexdump
printouts that the plaintiff tried to shred on the morning of the 26th. The shredder
would not swallow such infamy, and neither will this court! Observe the 29765A34F
in column 5 of p. 3451. The most innumerate of plaintiffs could not deny the damning
significance of this. It is, I submit, the smoking revolver, the flagrante delicto, the rea-
son the accused is now attempting to escape via the window behind the dock. Yes, he
killed Job 148! He wanted to load the %OK SNOBOL compiler. Our case rests, Your
Honor. Forgive me if I feel and appear a little Godlike; a touch of the Ellery Queens. I
must go now and bill."

DP dictionary n. Also called DP glossary. An attempt to freeze the volatile

vocabulary of an illiterate industry. This work is the first such to succeed.

DP fraud n. 1 The supplier's 300 percent markup. 2 The user's refusal to pay
because of petty contractual quibbles, such as nondelivery, nonperformance,
force mineure, and bankruptcy. 3 (Rare) An individual's failure to report the
unexpected bank credits or undercalculated invoices.

59
DP litigation

DP litigation n. Formerly the IBM-Justice Department antitrust action but

now chiefly the LOOK'N'FEEL closed-loop marathon devoted to the artistic
comparison of TRASH CAN icons.
:::)The few DP ATIORNEYS who were not engaged in the IBM monopoly affair usually
acted on behalf of one or more of IBM's bickering rivals (known then as the Seven
Dwarves). Minimum punitive damages of $1 billion were regularly claimed from IBM
(but never received) on the grounds that IBM's successful and profitable policy of
keeping most of their customers happy constituted unfair competition and restraint of
trade. This line of argument evaporated in the mid 1980s.
Other areas of DP litigation that arise from time to time include the vexing prob-
lem of copyright. One defendant, accused of copying a general ledger package,
received the following solomonic judgment: "The jury has, quite correctly in my view,
found you guilty, and my first reaction was to grant you the maximum sentence per-
mitted under the 1980 Protection of Packages (Whether Operational or Not) Act,
namely 10 years confined to your present terminal with no upgrade options. On fur-
ther, more merciful reflection, it being but your sixth offence this year, it occurred to
both the plaintiff and this judgeship that your unique ability to duplicate diskettes using
COPFLOP level 3.4 and FLOPCOP level 4.3 on the plaintiff's system arouses such a
heady mix of curiosity, admiration, and disbelief that the more appropriate punish-
ment, subject to your approval, ultra vires and nolo contendere, would be an immedi-
ate and indefinite promotion to DPM at the plaintiff's site, full costs in this matter, and
an irrevocable undertaking on your part to devote your undoubted talents to the greed
of the plaintiff rather than to your own.
The court be now upstanding until the Friday forenoon following the next St.
Presper's Day."
The 1980 act (op. cit.) was carefully drafted to prevent countersuits from those who
illegally copied inefficient or bug-ridden software. The notorious sequence of English
cases (Bloggs v. l1oyds; Bloggs v. Rex, and Bloggs v. Regina) stretching from 1940 to
1972 clearly influenced the law remakers. As is now widely known, an admitted safe
cracker, Lord "Pete Blower" Bloggs, damaged his heavily insured fingertips while
attempting to test the security of a Lloyds Bank deposit box outside the normal busi-
ness hours of the Park Lane branch, London, England, as 1939 was staggering to an
indifferent conclusion. Bloggs's counsel argued persuasively that while the normally
expected combinatorial defenses were perfectly "valeat quantum valere potest," the
bona fide "furunculus armariolorum" (innocent tester of small safes) should not also
have to cope with dangerously burred edges on the coded knobs. Lloyds had clearly
violated the Office Appliance Safety Ordinances of 1896 and the many amendments
thereto (190 1-1948). Further, the plaintiff had failed to secure any financial compen-
sation from his "actus non facit reum, nisi mens est rea." The plaintiff's injury and
wrongful incarceration had deprived the plaintiff and the plaintiff's backers of proven
recidivist income. "While the plaintiff is unable to engage in his trade," urged counsel,
"employing skills to which we all have contributed, Society itself is in the dock."
Counsel then joined the jury in a spirited rendition of:

60
 dump

The banks are made of marble

With a guard at every door;
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That Lord Bloggs sweated for!
(Lee Rice, "The Banks of Marble")'
Less dramatic but equally relevant actions have followed. Burglars, slipping as they
benchmarked suburban hallways in full pursuit of their vocational expectations, have
successfully sued not only the hallway owner, but also the Shiny Wax Corporation.
Correcting these anomalies, the 1980 Package Protection Act can be summed up as
"Caveat Fur" (let the thiefbeware!), or, to paraphrase Iago, "Who pirates my file, steals
trash" (Othello).

DPM n. [Diplomatic Psychiatric Mediator or Demented Programmer Minder.

Rare Data Processing Manager.]
~In a typical medium-sized commercial installation, the DPM ensures that the pay-
roll runs on time, that the month-to-date errors are cleared each month, and that the
quarter-to-date errors are cleared each quarter. Typically, the DPM becomes a free
agent before the year-to-date discrepancies ruin the office Christmas party.

DP VOGUE n. A daily glossy magazine devoted to the transitory topics of

computer science. Originally modeled on the eponymous sartorial monthly, it
soon required a higher publicational frequency. DP Daily now copes (barely)
with the swings and arrows of fashionable computing.

drag'n'drop v. To throwaway your mouse after the first attempt to copy a

file leads to its deletion. See a/so TRASH CAN.

dragging n. The canonical GUI method of moving a WIDGET to a point on the

screen determined by the unencumbered areas of your MOUSE PAD. See a/so
CUCK; MOUSE; DRAG'N'DROP.

drag queen n. A move in GUI chess.

drop'n'drag v. A basic Polish GUI gambit. Compare shoot'n'point. See a/so

ETHNOLOGY.

dryadlc adj. (Of a function) taking two wood-nymph arguments.

~Do not confuse with GONADIC.

DTP [Desktop Publishing.] n. An advanced word-processing application that

warns you after each page that you have used only 15 of the available 60 fonts.

dump n. & v. intrans. [Origin: English dump "a dull, gloomy state of mind,
low spirits; a thick, ill-shaped lump or hunk of anything; to deposit something

4. © 1950, STORMKING MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

61
DWIM

in a heap or unshaped mass, as from a cart."] Rather archaic 1 n. also called

postmortem dump and core dump. The bewildered, numerical mapping of
each molecule of a corpse in order to establish the cause of death. The exces-
sive volume of evidence is self-defeating, insofar as putrefaction outpaces
analysis. 2 v. intrans. To test the "0" and "I" printer or display elements at ran-
dom intervals. More advanced dumps may also exercise the "2" through ''7''
printer capabilities, while state-of-the-art dumps provide tests for some of the
alphabetic characters.
~Dumps are rather depressing, but looking on the bright side, they provide an excel-
lent check on the paper-low warning device.

DWIM \pronounced dwim.\ [Acronym for Do What I Mean.] The frustrated

cry of the programmer lost in the chasm between syntax and semantics. See
also INTELUSENSE.

dyadic adj. (Of a function) exposed to two arguments. See also DRYADIC.

dynamic adj. 1 (Of a RAM) in need of constant refreshment. 2 (Of a dump)

unexpected, unwelcome. 3 (Of a young executive) despised, short-lived. 4 (Of
an ffiM system/370 model 155. 165 Address Translator) expensive. 5 (Of a
salesperson) early bounding. 6 (Of a variable) late BINDING. Compare STATIC.
~The mathematical equations for chaotic systems contain two classes of variables:
static and dynamic. DP chaos mirrors this with compile-time-bound and run-time-
unbounded variables. A third category is meal-time-binding, the result of program-
mers' bad eating habits.

dynamic halt n. The name given. retrospectively, to an endless loop discov-

ered in MY PROGRAM.

dyslexia n. [Greek dys- "with difficulty, abnormal" + lexia "reading."] A dis-

ease pandemic among cheap input peripherals, wealthy illiterates, and
prrofredders. Compare ADD.

dyxlesla n. The self-diagnosis of a dyslectic. See DYSLEXIA.

~ Whence the famous graffito: "Dyxlesia Rules. KO?"

62
E
En. Yet another SINGLE-CHAR LANGUAGE, devised by Richardson, Carey, and
Schuh (University of Wisconsin). E can be interpreted as either (C++ )++ or,
considering the high-mortality rate of even the best academic languages, short
for Ephemeral. E increments C++ with the power of creating PERSISTENT
objects, and one hopes that this power extends to the language itself.

E13B n. A font designed for Madison Avenue and check sorters at the
expense of human legibility.
EBCDIC n. \Pronounced ebb-see-dick\ [Acronym for Extended Binary-
Coded Decimal Interchange Code.] An 8-bit code devised for the IBM
System/360 and based on the earlier 12-bit IBM card code. Compare Ascn.
~Initial objections from the Jacquard Weaving Syndicate (JAWS) were quickly
silenced by the allocation of codes for CC (Change Color), EW (End Woof), TWE
(Time Warp Escape), SLCSM (Switch to Low-Cost String Manipulation), and FB
(Fairisle Begin).

editor n. 1 (Software) A product capable of generating copies of a text with

random variations. See also TEXT EDITOR; TEXTUAL HARASSMENT; UNDO.

=>These variations usually arise from spurious mutations triggered by the editor itself,
but sometimes the user is allowed to collate his or her own random strings. known as
changes. If the edited copy is usefully near to the original. it is called a VERSION; oth-
erwise, it is referred to as a BACKUP.

2 (Primate, possibly human) A much maligned scapegoat, paid by the SQUIG-

GLE. Payment is determined by weighing the target manuscript before and
after assault, whence the terms "heavy" and "light" editing. The rare absence
of squiggles is known as a "copy edit."
=>Unlike Ambrose Bierce, whose entry at "editor" is one of the longest and most sar-
castic in The Devi/'s Dictionary, this chicken lexicographer is unwilling to provoke
editorial revenge. Nevertheless, diverse editors (non-MIT Press, of course) have con-
trived to improve submitted texts in unexpected ways: the "3-M cartridge" (as manu-
factured in Minnesota) emerged as a "3 MB cartridge." and my witty "easier done than
sed" in an essay on vi, came out as "easier said than done."

electron n. [Origin: eponymous heroine of the Greek novel Forever Amber.]

The smallest and most mobile of the charged elementary particles.
=>Luckily for the industry named after her, the electron is also the most enduring, in
spite of her driving habits. She consistently ignores the road signs on circuit diagrams
and drives on the right against the arrows, from output to input, flagrantly violating the
clearly marked potential gradients. See a/so LOOICAL DIAGRAM.

63
Else, Dangling

Else, Dangling See DANGLING ELSE.

e-mail, emall n. \pronounced ee-mail\ Abbrev. electronic mail. A picaresque

novella (also known as the header) listing the sequence of gateways, nodes,
mailers, and protocols responsible for garbling the appended one-line mes-
sage.
~The OED has a semi-prophetic citation: emailed (1480) " ... arranged in net or open
work." More at TNHO.

e-mail humor n. A measure of risibility inversely proportional to the num-

ber of grinning glyphs embedded in the text. Such glyphs, known as EMOTI-
CONS or SMILEYS, are the printed equivalent of the bar-room bore's nudge-
nudge or the sitcom's unrelenting laugh track. More at TNHD.
~There are now over 650 variations on Scott Fahlman's original sideways "have-a-
nice-day" :-). See David Sanderson, Smileys (Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly &
Associates, 1993). Peter Kirwin has mooted an email-aware extension of C known as
C:=). He also reports that "1be emoticon appears to have been anticipated by that great
combinatorialist and controversialist, Vladimir Nabokov. I quote from a 1969 inter-
view reprinted in Strong Opinions:
'Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the inunediate past?
A: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-
some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to
trace in reply to your question.'''

EMI (Overloaded Acronym) 1 English Musical Industries. 2 Experiments in

Musical Intelligence. 3 Electromagnetic Interference.
~Whence "EMI's EMI caused EMI" provides yet another daft challenge for auto-
mated contextual disambiguation.

emotlcon n. Also called SMILEY. See E-MAIL HUMOR.

empowerment n. The Clinton-Gore plan to provide the homeless with high-

speed, waterproof modems. See also SUPER DIGITAL HIGHWAY.

emulation n. [Latin emulgere "to drain out, exhaust."] A pack of hardware

and software tricks dealt by the manufacturer, allowing the user to acquire a
more expensive replacement system without the attendant miseries, or
improvements, of an UPGRADE. See also LffiERATION; SIDEGRADE.
~ The main commercial advantage of the generality of the general-purpose computer is
that machine A can be so programmed and interfaced that the user encounters patterns
of error and delay normally associated with machine B. Indeed, if the emulation is
extended to repainting the cabinets and falsifying the invoice letterhead, the user may
well remain unaware of the switch. Emulating slow, sequential processors on fast, par-
allel systems (while retaining all the idiosyncrasies of card-based batchness and parlay-

64
 English

ing years of RPG effort) has proved so successful that one wonders why, for example,
there are still ffiM 1400 installations not yet sidegraded to the 3601370 elysium. Current,
and more challenging, research centers on the problem of emulating large-scale efficient
mainframe systems on hordes of tiny, inefficient MICROPROCESSORS.

encapsulation n. Also incapsulatlon (rare). Preferred usage:

"Incapsulation ensures that ...•• but "Encapsulation insures that ...•• 1 Hiding
the details esp. from those who need to know. 2 Two of the seven pillars of
OBJECT ORIENTEERING. The other five are INHERITANCE, POLYMORPHISM, and
BRADY GOOCH. See also CLASS; HIDING, DATA.

~Incapsulation ensures that data members are incarcerated with the very methods
bent on sodomy. Data members evading such attacks (failing to get the message)
inevitably succumb to FRIENDlyfire.

endless loop n. See LOOP, ENDLESS.

~In YOURPROGRAM,an endless loop is known as an elementary blllllthr, whereas in

MYPROGRAMit is called a DYNAMIC
HALT.See the accompanying illustration.

Knock! Knock!

Who's there ?

Knock.

Knock who?

end user n. [Origin: from end ''the point in time at which something ceases,
termination of existence, death, fragment, remnant," + USER. 1 Plankton in the
DP food chain. 2 A user forced to accept the fact that the blissful days await-
ing delivery will never return. See also REALITY.

English n. [® [sic] Microdata Corporation.] 1 The least unnatural of the nat-

65
Engllah++

ural languages, likely to spread from Bawston to other parts of the United
States. 2 A programming language supported by the Logical Machine
Corporation's ADAM, and the Microdata Corporation REALITY systems. "Do
not adjust your terminal, there is a fault with Reality."
~The Reality programmer's guide includes the complete Oxford English Dictionary,
ample proof of their claim that it offers the most exhausting documentation. Since
English® is, perforce, absent any formal metaspeak on the upperdeck of the Clapham
omnibus, specified in English, it seems to meet Wirth's challenge that any decent lan-
guage compiler should be written in its own language.

EngUsh++ n. An object-oriented extension of ENGUSH.

~Initially mooted in a well-worn CompuServe CLFORUM thread by, inter alia, Larry
O'Brien, Jim Kyle, John Dlugosz, Ben Sano, Brian Hall, Rudyard Merriam, and SK-
B, English++ seeks to regulate the many ambiguities of "standard" English. Thus the
polymorphic "overloading" and late bindings of virtual verbs and prepositions help
resolve zeugma ("Kill the boys and the luggage" [Shakespeare» and syllepsis ("He left
with misgivings and Doris" [SK-Bl). Similarly, "The family is ready to eat" and "The
duck is ready to eat," can be safely combined in English++ to allow "The family and
the duck are ready to eat."

enterprlsewldth n. Corporate measure determining the potential for right-

sizing.

~The only applications worthy of attention at the moment seem to be user-centered,

prompt-to-market, mission-critical, open, scalable, seamIessly interoperable, and
enterprise-wide. The self-employed will be delighted to note that such applications are
provably attainable iff enterprisewidth = 1. See also RIGHTSIZE.

environment n. One of many phatic circumlocutions originating in the DP

environment and now spreading to other environments.
Thble of Environments·
In the office In an office environment·*
On the moon In a lunar environment
In vacuo In an empty environment
At home In an in-house environment
Under UNIX In a UNIX environment
Crashed In a non functioning environment
Chaotic In an unstructured environment
·Since weight and weightiness are highly regarded in DP documentation. the right hand column
variations should be used on all occasions.
"Note the common shift from the definite to the indefinite anicle.

Note: From the San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle. Sunday, November 9, 1980:

66
 erlstlc

During the sentencing, judge Stanley Frosh said Melton needed a more structured
environment, such as a pre-release camp. It was then that Melton reached into his
pocket and swallowed the poison, calmly washing it down with a glass of water, wit-
nesses said. His wife, after fondly patting her husband, swallowed the white powder
before a deputy could stop her.

Moral: The phrase "structured environment" should be avoided.

EOF n. Possibly overloaded abbrev.: End Of File; Extremely Old Fart.

~1NHD defines OF (Old Fart) as "Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable fre-
quency by (esp.) USENETters who have been progranuning for more than about 25 years
... This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person."
I suppose that we EDSAC I-ers from the 1950s might consider 25 years as the
young fart boundary, mere upstarts, pieds tendres, and comichons; but to maintain the
OF jargon, let us introduce and bask in the designation EOF:

"Keep right on to the end of the file,

"(Smile you bastards, smile)
"Keep right on to the end;
''Though the strings be long,
"And your getc:bar() wrong,
"Keep right on round the bend!
''Though you're tired and weary
"Still journey on,
'''Til you come to your happy abode;
"Where all you love
"And you're dreaming of ...
(Never dull, the final NULL)
"Will be there ...
"At the end of the file."

EPSS n. See EXPERIMENTAL PACKAGE SWITCHING SYSTEM.

ER Overloaded abbrevs.: Entity Relationship; Elizabeth Regina.

~Both Rule, OK?

eristlc n. & adj. [From Greek eris "strife."] The dominant mode of disputa-
tion that, having victory as its goal, is willing to bypass reason, truth, and other
flimsy obstacles.
~Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the Alexandrian geometer) became a full-
time eristic, and his ghost can be heard daily in the Senate.
A mild eristic manifestation is "proof by assertion," often accompanied by the wav-
ing of hands or, clinch-clinch, the banging of tables. Deities from day one have reveled
in more forceful argument-winning variants: smite is right! The Greek goddess Eris
(known as Discordia to the Romans) owns the copyright, but the whirlwind eristic
prize goes to Yahweh, thundering at Job:

67
ESP

"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? .. Where wast
thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? .. Hast thou commanded the morn-
ing since thy day; and caused the dayspring to know his place?" (Job 38:2-12)

Weak echoes of this fonn of reasoning can be still be heard as old farts browbeat their
upstart critics: "Where were you when the EDSAC I initial orders were written?"

ESP Overloaded abbrev.: Embedded Systems Programming; Extra Sensory

Perception. Warning Often resists contextual disambiguation.
~No connection?

Ethelred OS n. An operating system aimed at the ongoing nonuser environ-

ment. See SUPERCOMPUTER.

~Non-ICL users, as opposed to ICL nonusers, will need reminding that when the
British company International Computers Limited launched its 1900 series in 1959. it
was faced with two minor embarrassments. First. there were predictable sniggers, fos-
tered by the competition, that 1900 was the design vintage. These jokes, in fact. back-
fired. since the average English prospect reckoned that 1900 was a very good year,
suggesting systems of imperious, Victorian stability, in contrast to the ghastly frog-
plagued times evoked by a Univac 1108, or the futuristic uncertainties of a CDC 6400.
Second. ICL had embarked on a sequence of reignwise-refined operating systems called
George I. George II•... while a breathless. indifferent. historically confused market
checked the diverse merits of the Hanoverian succession. Would George ill madly relin-
quish the American market? The Ethelred OS was introduced at this point to initiate a
new. more honest. regal software genealogy.

ethnology n. "The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as rob-
bers. thieves. swindlers. dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists" (Ambrose
Bierce, ca. 1881).
~Alas. our tribes continue to cultivate mutual disdain. and ethnic jokes countenance
ethnic cleansing. The chilling fact is that the most decent and tolerant of our species
can chuckle over tales that enforce cruel and unjust group and racial stereotypes (see.
for example. Alan Dundes. Cracking lokes-Studies of Sick Humor Cycles and
Stereotypes (Berkeley. Calif.: Ten Speed Press. 1987). As an Anglo-lrish-French-
Polish family unit with Jewish. Basque. Welsh, and Scottish overtones. we present a
broad target for ethnic slurs but retaliate only against the Frisians. Perhaps "tribal"
maturity is reached when the '~okes" no longer offend.
Although I countt.ukasiewicz. Kuratowski. Chwistek. Ulam. Mazur. Banach. Tarski.
and Sierpmski among my heldenest heroes (my preferred Polish stereotype being the
brilliant logician-mathematician). I can still smile at the Polish Shoot'n'Point Camera.
the Polish doctor who treats hemophiliacs with acupuncture. and the outrageous cate-
chism: Q. What has an IQ of 300? A. Poland. Yet I wince at the story of the Pole who
learned English so that he could read Joseph Conrad in the original (ibid. p. 136).
PolishlUkrainian-bom. trilingual Conrad wrote all his masterpieces in English. which is
a sound enough reason for anyone to master that language. A more complex version of

68
 exit

this joke would have a Frenchman learning English so that he could read Samuel Beckett
in the original. Waiting for Godot, of course, to name but one, was composed first in
French (En anendant Godot), while Beckett's later works were written in English or no
language at all. I decided to unlearn all my languages so that 1 could read Beckett's
Breath in the original. See also HUNGARIAN ALGORITHM; IRISH SEARCH; POLISH NOTATION.

Euskera Batua n. All your Basques in one exit.

:::)Is there a UNIX angle to the long struggle by Euskaltzaindia (the Basque Language
Academy) formed in 1918 to establish a unified written version, Euskera Batua, from
the five major dialects (bizkaiera, gipuzkoera, lapurdiera, benafarrera, and
zuberoera/xiberoera)? Bai, halaxe da (yes, that is so)! It is summed up in Gabriel
Aresti's well-known plea: "Euskara bizi dadin, euskarak hiltzeko dira" (In order for
Basque to survive, the dialects must die) (Gorka Aulestia, Basque-English Dictionary
[Reno and Las Vegas, University of Nevada Press, 1993]). Note that even the Basque
for Basque-the-Ianguage has regional variants: Euskera and Euskara, and you still find
the unified language described as both Euskera Batua and Euskara Batua. An analogy
might be calling a unified UNIX both Common UNIX and Common XENIX.

event-clriven adj. [From event, "whatever happens" + driven, "compelled to

succeed."] (Of a disastrous programming paradigm) forced to anticipate the
unpredictable with an evergrowing switch-case statement.
:::)In happier, unwindowed days, USERS, enjoying a finite choice of rational, sequen-
tially menued options, knew and loved their subservient place. GUI madness, however,
spurred by the makers of RAM, has encouraged user-centric, asynchronous anarchy.
The event-driven programmer's angst de minuit is "What if the dextrous bugger dou-
ble-left-clicks while holding down Ctrl-Shift-FI2?"

EWOM n. [Acronym for Erasable Write-Only Memory. © Irish Business

Machines.] A refinement of the WOM (Write-Only Memory) allowing the chip
to be erased by (1) a fresh write sequence, (2) exposure to infrared light, (3) in-
depth frying for two hours with a portion of rock salmon, (4) a stick of gelignite.

exception reporting n. A system with intermittent printer problems.

exit v. intrans. To attempt to leave the current program by typing a sequence
of ignored farewells. See also HALTING PROBLEM.
:::)Many interactive systems shyly resist invocation, but once invoked, stubbornly
refuse to step down at the user's request. If the mandatory signing-off slogan is not
immediately available or effective, try a harmless prime number sieve, and await the
machine's natural rejection. See MfBF; INTELLISENSE.
There is, as yet, no standard string for use in the discontinuant or cessational envi-
ronments. Contenders under urgent review include BYE, PISS OFF, END, ADIEU,
BREAK, PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW, and the ANSl14-pound hammer
aimed at the screen (or two such hammers for the Ctrl+C interrupt option). LISP addicts
will need to surround their Abschied or Hammerschaft with a reasonable number of
parentheses.

69
expansion

More recent annoyances are guilt-inducing regimes such as WINDOWS that seek
your confirmation: "Are you really sure you want to exit? Click away, you lousy cop
out!"

expansion adj. (Of a sports franchise or PC board) Freshly inserted among

the scornful status quo and doomed to struggle for five seasons.

Experimental Package Switching System n. Also called EPSS. An on-

going, potentially never-ending project dedicated to ensuring the consistent
misdirection of long messages in large communications networks. See also
SDH.

:>The misrouting of stringent strings, e.g., telegraphic platitudes of five words or less,
even under the primitive protocols of Chappe, Edelcrantz, Morse, Baudot and Don
Ameche, can be achieved with the minimum of effort, and is subject to the Shannon-
Heisenberg uncertainty principle, "If the content of a message is 'fixed,' there is an
unavoidable error in determining its destination. and vice-versa." This delicate balance
between message mutilation and misdirection seems to break down with strings of
higher DENIER and increased signaling rates. Attempts to introduce new conceptual
invariants, such as the charm of the longer message, were vitiated by recent ALLC
experiments in which the entire text of Gone with the Wind was injected into the ARPA
network. The message emerged, with less than the predicted number of stylistic aber-
rations, on the TRS-SO cassette library of X. P. Qume in Ottumwa, Iowa. It appears that
the extra momentum of heavy, fast-moving messages overcomes the intended switch-
ing strategy at certain nodes, rather as a runaway locomotive jumps the points.

expert n. One of an opinionated group (esp. Economics Nobel laureates)

holding views that are mutually incompatible with the views of all others in
the group. See also NIH.
:>When the Great Day comes, we'll have but one expert per topic. The Dublin horol-
ogist, TIm O'Day, was asked why each of his sixty clocks registered a different time.
"Bejays," says he, "if they all showed the same, I'd only need the one."

expert system n. The sad reduction of AI's nobler aims to a sequence of "IF
Nelly claims THEN ... ELSE ...••
:>Nelly from Liverpool is the archetypical expert. "Sitting next to Nelly" remains the
primary pedagogic strategy in diverse industrial disciplines, ranging from gutting fish
to stuffing black puddings. If the trainee asks why she graded the apple as 3, Nelly will
say "Well, it's better than a 4, but never a 2, you daft sod."

Extended BASIC n. [From extended "fully stretched, prolonged" + BASIC.]

I "Shit with icing" (P. B. Fellget). 2 Any BASIC compiler or interpreter
enhanced with features stolen from COBOL and C and meeting any two of the
following conditions: (1) the cost exceeds $39.95, (2) line numbers can be
incremented automatically or omitted, (3) labels can be alpha-numeric, (4)
tape cassettes are not supported, (5) A$ is an object.

70
F
FAQ n. Frequently Asked Question. What's a FAQ? How is FAQ pronounced~
See TNHD and UNIX Review. July 1994.
FASTRAND n. [<9 Sperry Rand Corporation.] A nonfloppy rotating cylindri-
cal device used for storing angular momentum.
~In the event of power failure, the FASTRAND can be coupled to a standby genera-
tor for several days. Note that the total angular momentum available is slightly reduced
if the data-storage option is fitted, owing to the braking effect of the read-write heads
on the magnetized drum surface. 1bree or more FASTRANDs should not be switched
on simultaneously at the same site without consulting Sperry's in-house geophysicist.
The latter will also advise on the correct latitude-dependent orientation of the drum
axis to avoid data loss due to corio lis forces.

fault-tolerant adj. I (Of a Quality Assurance Department) tolerant to a fault;

willing to overlook defects in the noble pursuit of timely deliveries. 2 (Of a
system) earthquake-proofed to survive the BIG ONE.

featurlsm n. Usual usage blatant featurism. Term of abuse applied to the

more richly endowed products of your competitors.

FHF [Free Hardware Foundation.] A mooted extension to the FSF (Free

Software Foundation).

FIFO adj. [Acronym for First In, First Out.] (Of a STACK) Able to "deal from
the bottom," using legersdestack. Compare UFO; UNO.

finite-state adj. I (Of a sales tax) ranging from 0 to 100 percent, depending
on the state. 2 (Of a machine) having a limited repertoire.
~It can be proved that if a finite-state machine is left to run long enough-for 24
hours prior to a payroll deadline, say-at least one machine state will recur. This is
known as the error state. See also lURING MACHINE; UTM.

firewall n. I A desperate but inevitably flammable barrier between the

CRACKER and the cracked. 2 An inscrutable modem and protocol manual.
More at TNHD.

~The honest CRACKER is not only determined to test your defenses, but having broken
in, is resolved to check the rest of your vulnerable system. Your firewall, therefore,
should be constructed more as an appraisal than as a moat: Whom do you trust to
debug your kernel and test the relational integrity of your databases?

firmware n. A neutral, noware zone between hardware and software, free to

deflect blame in either direction, and enabling problems to be solved by three
sets of modifications rather than one.

71
first-time

first-time adj. (Of a user) virginal and secretly panting for the salesperson's
sacrificial knife.
;;!>Afew first-time users somehow survive the bloody initiation.

"I didn't like it the first time.

But, Oh! how it grew on me."
(Julie Lee, "The Spinach Song")

fix n. & v. trans. [Latin figere ''to attack with reproaches, to render immov-
able."] 1 n. A palliative shot in the system's arm, becoming less effective with
each application. 2 v. trans. To remove (a BUG) by redefining the program
specification in order to take advantage of an unexpected feature. See also
DEBUGGING.

fleep n. Also called feep, bleep, beep. [From JARGON FILE.] The soft bell
sound emitted by a display terminal.
;;!>The softness of the fleep varies according to the VDU and the calamity signaled. The
fleep of the VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears.

flip-flop n. 1 A primitive and noisy bistable device.

;;!>Flip; flip-flop;
The circuit keeps a squeggin'
And it won't stop;
Flip; flip-flop;
I guess I'll have to change it
To a good Kipp;
What is it, it does to me?
What mad kind of thrill do I find?
Switchin' on the HT, the LT;
Don't know it's alive but
It's driving me out of my ...
Flip; flip-flop;
The circuit keeps a squeggin'
And it just won't stop ... flip-flop!

2. A double-sided FLOPPElTE.

=>As in the pop record industry, the interesting tracks are usually stored on the flip
side.

floating-point adj. Also FP. (Of a number) able to keep its head above water
during the most crunching of computations. See also NUMBER CRUNCHER.

floppette n. Also called ftoppy, ftoppy disk, diskette. [Diminutive of flop

"failure."] Any of various non-hard memory devices with non-soft error
propensities. See also FLIP-FLOP; FLOPPY DRUM.

72
 FLOPS

~F1oppy disks must be handed with great care. Keep away from tobacco smoke,
grease, nuclear reactors, gravitational fields, ballpoint pens, fingers, meteorites,
untreated sewage, and floppy drives. Always store away from strong moonlight at 0
kelvin in a neutrino-free environment. Before discarding used, that is, encoded, flop-
pies, read Irish Business Machines' racy leaflet }()()} Things to Do with Old
Floppenes. Table mats, coasters, flower-pot drainers, and models of the Taj Mahal are
among the many bright gift ideas.
Note that the use of "Ie floppy" in Francophone domains is punishable by death.
The Academie-ordained term is Ie disque souple.

floppy drum n. [© Irish Business Machines.] An early low-cost mass mem-

ory device, now superseded by the FLOPPETIE.

~Conversion from floppy drum to disk is not difficult, and can be undertaken by any
user of average intelligence using everyday household tools. Simply cut along the dot-
ted line and reshape as required. (See the accompanying illustration.) ffiM provide free
5- and 8-inch templates: send the crate tops from three 3701168 systems plus $1.98 for
postage, packing, and insurance.

S1'ep f

AA

Step 2

AA

Step 3

FLOPS n. [Rare: Acronym for Roating Point Operations Per Second.] Now
replaced with KFLOPS (kilo), MFLOPS (mega), GFLOPS (giga), and, next
week, TFLOPS (tera). Compare MIPS.

73
:::>Note that the final "S" does not indicate a plural, so correct usage is I FLOPS, 2
FLOPS, etc. The solecism "I FLOP" is as rare as a coprocessor chip with such dismal
performance, but "I MFLOP" is often encountered.

flowchart n. & v. [From flow "to ripple down in rich profusion, as hair" +
chart "a cryptic hidden-treasure map designed to mislead the uninitiated."] 1
n. The solution, if any, to a class of Mascheroni construction problems in
which given algorithms require geometrical representation using only the 35
basic ideograms of the ANSI template. 2 n. Neronic doodling while the sys-
tem burns. 3 n. A low-cost substitute for wallpaper. 4 n. The innumerate lead-
ing the illiterate. "A thousand pictures is worth ten lines of code" (Mao Tse
T'umps, The Programmer's Liule Red Vade Mecum, Subversive Software
Publications, 1968). 5 n. A set of systems analysts' Rausch tests, revealing
their innermost, twisted procedural fantasies. (See the accompanying illustra-
tion.) 6 v. intrans. To produce flowcharts with no particular object in mind. 7
v. trans. To obfuscate (a problem) with esoteric cartoons.
:::>The flowchart fell into disrepute during the 19805 as higher-level languages
emerged of which the source code proved to be more legible than endless reams of
linked, annotated boxes. The arrival of VISUAL programming in the 1990s has, alas, put
the clock back with a vengeance.

Algorithm for maximizing human happiness

Increase human happiness

Yes No

End

foolproof adj. (Of a system) inaccessible by the USER. Compare INTUmvITY.

footprint n. Desktop indentations revealing the size and weight of your

devotion to personal productivity. See also PLATFORM.

74
 FORTRAN

foot worm n. Also called ring wonn. A graduate INCH WORM who, forsaking
marigolds, mensurates on the branches of labeled trees.

forecasting n. An activity to be avoided, especially in relation to future

events (attrib. Oscar Wilde).
=>DP prophets, a burgeoning subset of industry watchers and analysts, face a tricky
balancing act. Their clients are impressed by "spurious accuracy," whereby a firm pre-
dicted annual PowerPC growth rate of 9.61 percent carries considerable weight and
billability. Post factum factoring, however, favors less precise prognostications of
"about to percent," qualified with phrases such as "other things being equal," or
"depending on what the buggers at Intel do."
The literature reveals some prime examples of rash prophecy:
• In 1989 John C. Dvorak claimed that NEURAL Networks would be able to predict
the scores of NFL games "to within a point" during 1990.
• "The market for LISP machines should exceed $1.2 billion in 1990."
(ComputerWorld. 16 April 1986).
• "Three EDSAC machines will satisfy the computing needs of all UK universities
for the foreseeable future."

Forth n. Often caps FORTH. A unique, stack-oriented programming cult

invented by Charles H. (Chuck) Moore ca. 1970. See also SINGLE-CHAR LAN-
GUAGE.

=>Astrophysicist-cowboy Moore originally brought forth FOURTH (as in next gener-

ation) but was forced to drop the "U" in order to meet the five-character naming limi-
tation of the then available operating system (compare FORTRA and FORTRAN). Although
Forth never became a major, mainstream success like C, it has, like APL, nurtured a
pleasantly fanatic set of groupies. Forth's famed resource-wise parsimony has proved
especially attractive in embedded systems applications. Folklore has it that Jean
Sammet excluded Forth from HOPL-I (ACM's first History of Programming
Languages conference) on the grounds that a computer language, by definition, must
have a syntax. This omission was happily corrected for HOPL-II (See ACM SIGPLAN
Notices 28, no. 3 [March 1993], ed. Richard L. Wexelblat).

FORTRA n. An early FORTRAN implemented on the IBM!704 that limited

identifiers to the first six (upper case) letters (Henry G. Baker).

FORTRAN n. [Acronym for FORmula TRANslating system.] One of the ear-

liest languages of any real height, level-wise, developed out of Speedcoding
by Backus and Ziller for the IBM!704 in the mid-1950s in order to boost the
sales of 80-column cards to engineers.
=>In spite of regular improvements (including a recent option called STRUCfURE), it
remains popular among engineers but despised elsewhere. Many rivals, with the ben-
efit of hindsight, have crossed swords with the old workhorse! Yet FORTRAN gallops
forward

on, warts and all, fired by a bottomless pit of proven libraries. Lacking the compact
power of APL, the intellectually satisfying elegance of ALGOL 68, the didactic inci-
sion of Pascal, the spurned universality of PUI, the military might of Ada, and the
exciting dangers of C, FORTRAN survives, nay, flourishes, thanks to a superior invest-
mental inertia.
forward adj. (Of a reasoning chain) presumptuous; jumping to conclusions,
as in
IF BALANCE<O THEN PRINT "You are overdrawn"

See also BACKWARD.

FPU Floating Point Unit. Formerly a separate math coprocessor chip but now
added to the main microprocessor together with a heatsink and a fan.

free loader n. The despised linker that comes with your compiler (Henry G.
Baker).
freelance adj. [Origin: either free "expensive" (as, "the best things in life are
free") + lance a large lancelet, a not-so-diminutive fishlike animal," or from
15th-century weapons sales jingle: "Buy three lances, get one free!"] Immune
from litigation.
freeware n. 1A program that is not worth pirating. 2 The main vehicle for
the dissemination of VIRuses. "Who steals my code, steals trash" (Immanuel
Agogo). See also SHAREWARE; FSF; PIRACY.

friend n. (c++ keyword) A non-member, granted membership privileges. If

class X says you are a friend, you can access X's private and protected parts
with no risk of costly litigation. As in real life, friendship is not necessarily
transitive. (X is a friend of Y) and (Y is a friend of Z) does not imply that (X is
a friend of Z), but where I live, X and Z have already shacked up and dropped
Y.
FS n. [Future Series. © IBM.] Also called Freundliches Schwert (Friendly
Sword). [© Richard Wagner.] A sword of Oamocles for the non-IBM minori-
ty. See also VAPORWARE;NT.

~IBM's next product announcement, or possibly the one after the next. Who knows
if the FS if really hanging over the marketplace? ffiM's announcement that "FS is sus-
pended" is ambiguous, to say the least. Cynics say that FS will be a 1401 for $20
(printer ribbons and software not included); others say it will be level 3 of
ACFINCPNS or a 7090 emulator for the 4331. Myth has it that a Heldenprogrammer
will one day descend on the misty Poughkeepsie Nibelheim singing "I'm busy doing
Notung"; he will reforge the mighty FS, rescue Grace Brilnhopper from a burning
Bliibell mountaintop, and restore IBM's rightful 100 percent share of the market. For
was it not written:

76
 fuzzy

Da hast du die Stacken, (Well, there are the bits,

schlindlicher Stamper You blundering botcher!

Warst du entzwei You were unstable

ich zwang dich zu ganz; But I have made you whole;
kein Schlag soil nun dich mehr You are now completely user-
zerschlagen prooO
(Richard Wagner, Siegfried, act I, tr. SK-B)

FSF [Free Software Foundation.] Richard Stallman's brave but doomed

attempt to bankrupt the "free market" software industry. See also FHF; GNU;
COPYLEFf.

FUBAR [Acronym for F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition.] British Army

slang now gentrified to "foobar," a popular metasyntactic variable. More at
TNHD.

function n. 1 (Math. and CS) a mechanism for mapping a domain of dubi-

ous ARGUMENTs into (rare onto) a range of unreliable results. 2 (General) the
stated action or purpose of something, later denied in a small-print fitness-for-
use footnote.

functionality n. Preferred usage: added or improved functionality.

Marketese inflation of FUNCf10N(2). See also CARD.
fuzz n. [Backformed from adj. FUZZY.]1That which prevents U.S. research
projects from being funded and papers on topology from being published. 2
That which makes Japanese trains and dishwashers run on time. Compare
HAIR.

fuzzy adj. [Origin: possible corruption of Farsi.] 1(Of a logic) one in which
modus ponens is replaced with modus vivendi. 2 (Of a set) a Colonialist poet
Kipling's wuzzy warriors. b "Slightly-too-naive" for Halmos. See also FUZZ;
ZADEH,LarFI.
~A1though it means "clever" to Japanese Fifth et seq. Generations, for Western ears
"fuzzy" can never quite escape the overtones of fluff and imprecision. Thus, when
Canon proudly introduced a ''fuzzy lens," the news was greeted differently in Tokyo
and Leipzig. However, as with CHAOS, the formal definitions of "fuzzy" are firmly
planted in a non-fluffy determinism of Calvinistic proportions. Whether "big," "tall,"
and "big'n'tall" are points or ranges, sooner or later membership is determined by a
flag in the CCR (Condition Control Register) following a boring sequence of BLEs
(Branch Less than or Equal).
Fuzzy-alone is no longer a marketable predicate, so one must batten down for a del-
uge of neural-fuzzy-object-based thingies.

77
G
G \giga\ The SI (Syst~me International) prefix multiplying by either lQ9 or 230
depending on whether you are buying or selling.
=>Once considered exotic, the Gbyte (often called a "gig") is now commonplace;
indeed it is fast becoming laughably inadequate for both disk and RAM if decent OS/2
or Windows NT performance is required. To end the boring debate over pronunciation,
be it forthwith mandated that both "g"s are hard. This avoids the real possibility of
confusion with "jigger" (Scouse [Liverpool] dialect for a "back entry dividing a row
of terraced houses"), "jidger" (the didgeridoo-player's embouchure), and "gijah" (a
short truce during a Moslem holy war). One is reminded of Genene, the former CEO
of lIT, who is reputed to have told a confused underling that "The 'g' is soft as in
Jesus, not hard as in God."

gainsay v. To deny.
=>''There's no gain saying that the (CIS) CompuServe Information Service can be, at
times, monumental in size and scope" (Editorial in CompuServe Magazine. October
1992).
The difference between "no gain saying" and "no gainsaying" is quite subtle. In
"gainsay," sans space, we have a transitive verb derived from Middle English gayn,
"against" and sayen, ''to say." To "gainsay" is to speak against, to contradict, to deny.
But in "gain saying" we have a different "gain," from ME gayne, with the familiar
notion of "increase" or "profit." As luck would have it, the quoted passage makes sense
in both contexts. With the space removed (as intended, I'm sure), the editor is saying
''There's no denying that. .. " As printed, it says "Why bother saying that. .. " Of course,
the "at times" is rather inappropriate, implying that the size and scope of CIS can, on
occasions, oscillate between "monumental" and "non-monumental" states.

gangpunch v. trans. To ensure that a sequence of cards is mispunched con-

sistently.

garbage n. & adj. \pronounced gar-bidge but often pseudo-refined to gar-

barge. cf. garage, barrage, cleavage.\ 1 n. Rubbish, trash; the defining by-prod-
ucts of an effluent society. 2 n. User-perpetrated input. 3 n. (RAM) Essential,
well-tried data unjustly denigrated by programs unable to gain access. 4 adj.
(Of a collection) relating to frantic, futile, low-level attempts to avoid insuffi-
cient-memory errors by incurring insufficient-time errors. See a/so GIGO.
gate n. One of the nine Apollinarian "portes" to algorasmic bliss.
Gates, William (member FDIC, aka Bellevue Billy) Founder/CEO of
Microsoft Corporation, and youthfully, richly immune to jealous satire. As the
second wealthiest U.S. billionaire, he tries harder. See a/so MAW; UNDOCU-
MENTED; WINDOWS.

78
 gl••• tty

:;;:;>BiIIsensibly disputes the Forbes's annual wealth tables. A minor fluctuation in

Microsoft share values can increase or decrease his net worth by untold millions. We,
los decamisados, must count our blessings.

gee whiz adj. Relating to some superficially flashy aspect of technology

intended to amuse and distract the layperson.

GBH [Putative origin: Brit. abbrev. Grievous Bodily Harm.] The aggravat-
ingly red nano-mouse located at the centroid of the "G," "B," and "H" keys of
an IBM notebook.

gender n. The earthling nexus of connector conspiracies.

:;;:;>00other planets, enjoying more exotic coupling methodologies, added angsts du
jour are the number and size of the pins:

"Whip Jamboree, Whip Jamboree,

"Momentum equals ~V,
"Them three-legged gals are the ones for me,
"Keep her on the orbit, son."
(Stan Kelly, "Space Shanty," liverpool Lullabies London: HeathsidelSING,
1964)

genetic adj. (Of an algorithm) Evolving instantly to the worst case after bil-
lions of divergent mutations. See also GRANDFATHER-FATHER-SON.
:;;:;>''Thedrosophilia's fleeting moment in the sun is now but a floating point in the SUN"
(Sol Stein, "Darwin Deconstructed").

general-purpose graphs n. [© Irish Business Machines.] A set of graphi-

cal visual aids designed to reduce your overhead overheads. See the illustra-
tion on pp. 80-81.

Gershwin's law It ain't necessarily so.

GFE (The Pick Operating System) Originally, abbrev. General Format Error,
now interpreted as Gone For Ever. See also SARCONYM.
as
:;;:;>ThePick has a brilliant but volatile file structure much loved by the purveyors
of the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply).

GIGO n. Acronym for Gospel In, GARBAGE Out.

gliding the Illy n. The fruitless attempt to improve an already perfect sys-
tem, e.g., by replacing a data cassette with a floppy disk, or by upgrading from
Solaris 2.1 to 2.2.

glass tty n. \pronounced glass titty.\ A CRT terminal so lacking in features

that it behaves like a TIY. More at TNHD.

79
 x

o t
"Time is running out~1

o t
"We should overtake the comp8tition by ... "

o
"Let us not be unduly pessimistic ... "

E
UWe have maintained our traditional marketing
supremacy in the Southwest."

80
 global

o t

"Your new Boord of Directors is confi dent thot ... II

o
N In the absence of any clear trends we are holding the
dividend at ... II

glitch n. & v. trans. [Origin: possibly blend of glitter + hitch or Yiddish

glitsh- 'n "skip, skid."] 1 n. Any unexpected and transient fluctuation in the
power supply or, by extension, any sudden change for the worse in the status
quo. 2 v. trans. To upset (a component or system) by the, usually unintention-
al, addition of a glitch. 3 v. trans. (local usage, Stanford University,
California.) To engage in SCROLLING (on a display screen). See also GRITCH.
More at TNHD.

global adj. [Latin globus "a ball."] 1 (Of a variable) able to bounce around
the system, transferring arbitrary values to and from unconnected programs. 2
(Of an error) ideal; detectable; correctable; minor. Compare LOCAL.
~All unavoidable errors should be made global. Local errors can lurk around unno-
ticed for months, gathering malignant momentum, suppurating behind the scenes until

81
GNU

the system suddenly collapses from the sheer mass of smegmous accretion. See SOFT-
WAREROf.

GNU n. [Recursive acronym: GNU is Not UNIX.] \pronounced G-noo\

Richard M. Stallman's noble attempt to restore UNIX to its primordial, off-
licensed anarchy. Malgre cela, a host of entrepreneurs are waxing fat by
installing, debugging, maintaining, and trans-licensing GNU software. See
FHF; FSF; COPYLEFr; RMS. More at TNHO; Compare INCA.

GOD n. Acronym for General Oracle Dispenser. See SUPERCOMPUTER.

Gadot n. A sarcastic name applied generally to any project or device which

fails to materialize after the nth deadline. See also ETHELRED os.
golf ball n. A spherical printing device, so called from its early propensity to
fly off in random directions to unpredictable places.
:::>An Olivetti model (serial #098-43245) holds the world record for distance: 546
yards at St. Andrews University, Scotland, on January 3, 1969, using a specially dim-
pled character set. M. Thumps holds the record for the most golf balls lost during a sin-
gle round of on-line editing. In a l2-hour session at the mM Selectric Rail TRAIN sys-
tem terminal (see CURSOR), Thumps lost 89 golf balls (comprising 16 distinct type-
faces). During this period, incidentally, he also lost five trains, three friends, a $500
productivity bonus, and his job.
A hole in one has been claimed by Ann Arbor University, Michigan, but the details
are too disgusting to merit objective reportage.

gonad Ie adj. See DYADIC.

g08ub n. [From verb "go" and Latin sub "under.] A CALL made on some
nonexistent or noncooperative routine, resulting in instant downage.
9Oto n. & v. & adj. 1 n. A GOTO ORDER. 2 v. trans. to transfer control (to a dis-
tant line or label). 3 v. in trans. To transfer control to nowhere in particular. 4
adj. (Of an order or instruction) hazardous, irresponsible, fatal, inviting con-
tempt. 5 n. A minor flaw in the C language. See also CASE.
goto order n. [Origin: possibly biblical: "Go to, let us go down and con-
found their language."-Jehovah at Babel (Genesis 11:7); or possible
metathesis of "order to go, (U.S.) term used in the cafeteria system.] A
delightful but dangerous feature of many primitive (unstructured) mid-level
languages, whereby a programmer can pass control to some remote, unwrit-
ten part of a program and break for coffee. Compare COME FROM.
:::>The powerful academic lobby promoting GOTOless programming [e.g., al-Khasi
(1449), Dijkstra (1968), Wirth (1970), and Knuth (1970)] received support from an

82
 Groech'. law

unexpected direction when Anthony Newley's recording of Where Shall I Goto? made
the charts in 1976.

Grand GUignol n. [French: Un spectacle d'une horreur sanglante et melo-

dramatique.] See DESKTOP; GUI.
grandfather-father-son adj. Being or pertaining to three files believed to
have some genealogical relationship. Owing to the hazards of updating and
GENETIC mutation (see also SOFIWARE Rar), the grandfather, if still alive, car-
ries more authority.
~Those who seek some neo-Oarwinian interpretation of the evolution of programs
and data files are thwarted by the complexities of ONE-LINE PATCHES, the conflicting
definitions of fitness and survival, the apparent death wish of OPMs, and the morpho-
genetic instability of the editing process. "For the sins of Mk I shall visit Ye, yea unto
the Nth generation" (St. Presper's Stridor Dentium, Incisor IV, molar Hi).

graphical adj. (Of a system) capable of, and mainly engaged in, the display
or printing of continuous-line Snoopy renditions. See also GUI.

great moments In computing history n. A collection of boring anec-

dotes: as,
"Paging Mr. Samas, paging Mr. Samas ... There's a Mr. Powers on the
line ... "
"Professor Wilkes, the man's here with the mercury ... "
''T.J., I think we should call it virtual memory ... "
"Yes, I know it's small, but we can still use the big cabinets ... "
"But, Grace, darling, that will allow anyone to program ... "
"Bill Gates is offering $20,000 for our non-reentrant DOS?"

green adj. (Of a PC) PC.

grltch n. & v. [Origin: possibly exclamation "Grrr" + "hitch" or corruption of

GLITCH.] 1 n. A complaint or expression of frustration (usually following a
glitch). 2 v. intrans. To complain.
Grosch's law [Formulated by Herbert R. J. Grosch in the late 19408.]
"Computing power is proportional to the square of system cost."
~K.E. Knight has shown that up to 1976, in spite of diverse changes in technology,
leasing policies, and inflation, Grosch's law had been religiously observed by the cost-
ing and marketing departments of the major OP manufacturers. "And so it was done
that the Grosch prophet be maintained" (St. Presper's Admonishments to the Parasites,
Level 01, release iv). To some, the mini- and micro-revolutions have obscured the
validity of Grosch's law, but it remains honored in the canon of mainframe orthodoxy.
Indeed, cynics in the latter camp point out that the equation

83
Grosch'. Law, corollary to

P=kO

where P = computing power, C = cost, and k is the Grosch constant of proportionali-

ty, is vacuously true for mini- and microcomputers, with P = k = 0 for all values of C.
The nonabashed mainframer still dreams of exploiting Grosch's law by buying bigger
and costlier systems, and sections of the industry will forever try to oblige. See
GROSCH'S LAW, COROLLARY TO; SUPERCOMPUTER.

Grosch's law, corollary to "Development cost is proportional to the cube

of the target performance." See also GROSCH'S LAW; SUPERCOMPUTER.
grunge n. [Origin obscure; possibly onomatopoeic blend of grunt and
cringe.] The patina that eventually enhances all hardware and software
exposed to the human environment.
~A janitorian writes: "A really healthy grunge takes time and should not be rushed.
Smegmologists worth their salt can sniff out an artificially accelerated layer of grunge
with instant disdain. Genuine grunge is not only an object of sublime beauty, a
palimpsest of DP endeavor, but also a threatened source of information to the indus-
trial microarcheologist. Many installations, despite regular upgrades, retain some ves-
tigial reminders of earlier, happier days-a bypassed accounting machine, a 9O-col-
umn sorter, perhaps, a sales analysis written in RPG-I, or a real-time ThrboProlog-
controlled trephine--either for sentimental reasons or from sheer necessity. Patient
probing of the grungial strata residing on these bygones can reveal unexpected facts
about earlier DP cultures. Our present knowledge, however scanty, of the Collator
People, for example, stems entirely from nanodigs made in the 19708 at MIT, a site
still rated highly by grunge sifters and DP historians. The janitorial fellowship is unit-
ed in its effort to avoid the mindless removal of vital evidence from computer equip-
ment. As Dr. Thumpton, the doyen of DP microarcheology, once explained, "Each
console fingermark, each keyboard coffee stain, each half-removed adhesive label is a
priceless, sacred token of our heritage.'''
GUI \pronounced gooey, rhyming with phooey\ [Graphical User Interface.] A
massive and successful conspiracy to sell MIPS and RAM to the illiterate. See
also ICON; TVI; TRASH CAN.
guru n. [Origin: Hinduism, "spiritual guide."] (UNIX) The local Shiva who,
being one Vedic man page ahead of the site, can create and destroy as the
whim dictates. See also METHODOLOGY; SYSADMIN.

84
H
h file n. [Originally from "header file" but now often referred to as "headache
file."] Also called include file. 1 A C file with the extension .h used to
increase the size of files with the extension .exe. 2 A device for OVERLOADING
your NAMESPACE (Henry G. Baker). See also CODE BLOAT.

HA ad}. [Origin: exclamation of doubt, surprise, and/or amusement but now

presumed prefix for Human-assisted.] (Of computing) as seen by a tolerant
computer. See also BA; CA.
hacker n. One who hacks real good. Much more at TNHD.
hair n. The subsumed substance that makes problems, programs, and devices
HAIRY. See also HIRSUTE; FUZZ.

=>The Scouse dialect, as spoke in Liverpool and contagious suburbs, has a similar
adjective-to-noun transformation. Anything that is "tatty" owes its "tattiness" to the
presence of "tats" (Frank Shaw, Fritz Spiegl, and Stan Kelly-Bootie, urn Yerself
Scouse: How to Talk Proper in Liverpool [Liverpool, England: Scouse Press, 1966]).

hairy adj. 1 (Of a program or system) unduly complex, overly convoluted,

beyond fathomage, trichomatic. 2 (Of a person) weak-chinned, complexify-
ing, able to add or subs tract HAIR according to demand. "For I am an hairy
man, but Alan was an smooth man" (St. Presper, De Ane Publica Statuque
Anis [Concerning the An of the State and the State of the An]). See also
DEPILATION.

Halting problem n. 1 DP The problem of stopping a computation between

crashes.
=>Ahalting engineer writes: "Users sometimes want to interrupt a job without waiting
for the system to abort. If the machine has no stop or suspend facility (or if these func-
tions fail to work), we recommend the use of the power-off switch rather than remov-
ing the power plug. The latter action occasionally invokes a standby UPS (if fitted), and
your unwanted job or endless loop will continue. Even the power-off switch will not
always guarantee termination because of what we engineers call the running-on prob-
lem. As with the analogous automotive problem, the cure is to clean all the contacts,
check the timing, and try a higher-octane power supply."
2 Computer science The abstract problem, solved negatively by Alan M.
Thring, which, essentially, seeks a general method for deciding whether an
arbitrary program will terminate or not in the crash less environment.
=>Turing's formal proof of the nonexistence of the programmer's much-needed touch-
stone is closely related to GOdel's work on undecidable propositions. The curious laity

85
handle

should read Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel. Escher; Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
(New York: Basic Books, 1979). The undercurious are referred to the accompanying
illustration, which, according to DP folklore, was jotted on the back of an envelope by
Turing during a London-Cambridge train journey with Strachey.

Does the given program

have any
endless loops?

Holt

handle n. 1 An alias allowing remote, guilt-free mutilation. 2 A POINTER to a

pointer or "passing-the-buck-squared." See also INDIRECTION; POINTEE; HIDING,
DATA.
~Borrowed from the phrase "getting a handle on things," the DP handle is a homely,
reassuring concept hiding, inter alia, several layers of complexity. The handle-as-
pointer can remain fixed while the target structure is casually relocated by the memo-
ry mismanagement system. Warning: the purists who hate pointers and loathe all forms
of hiding are made doubly mad by any reference to this term. In particular, avoid mak-
ing declarations such as Handle messiah;.

hangup, hang up, hang-up n. & v. 1 n. The condonable murder of an

intrusive communicator and the brief period of guilt following the deed. 2 n.
(Archaism) a command in the discontinuant environment harking back to the
time when telephones were vertical.
hard sector n. An area of a disk resisting access.
hardware n. The easy part of the system. Compare FIRMWARE; MIDDLEWARE;
SOFIWARE; VAPORWARE.
~The callosity of a ware is best judged by considering the difficulties faced by the
goods inward clerk as incoming items are checked against the supplier's advice note.
Receipts such as:
400ft' Frames, boards, mother, holding, S-IOO, 6" bolts, retaining, hexagonal, tap-
ping, self, aluminum. Part #3601168-PDQ-3625 165261A

present fewer problems than, say:

86
 heurl8tlcs

l-off Disk, floppy, teeny-weeny Pascal, level 56.127, contains all fixes in appen-
dices 12-68 of attached release dated 12110190.

or:

I-MB add-on virtual memory.

Hartree constant n. Also called Hartree's constant. [After Douglas

Raynor Hartree (1897-1958), English physicist and computer pioneer.] The
fixed time interval H between now t and the time Ta when any given DP pro-
ject is completed.
~If Tj is the time when a promise is made to complete a project at time Tp
then
Ta > t >= Tp >= Tj
and

Ta-t=H
It follows that

i.e., DP projects are never completed.

hello, world n. [Often confused with the verbose "hello, world!"] The pro-
totypical nerdstring displayed by compiling and executing heUo.c, the
Urquelle (primary source) code from p. 6 of K&R (Brian W. Kernighan and
Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language [Prentice-Hall, 1978]). See
c (as the blues rider say).
::::>The"world" responded to this greeting with instant devotion, probably, hint the cyn-
ics, because the full syntax of printf() was not revealed until p. 145 (IBm BEN PASSIM).
Progress in language, compiler, and OUI design since K&R has been warily correlated,
often inversely, with the increasing size of "hello, world" executables. Not content
with the original, one-line, legible, monospaced ASCII text, as God intended, current
implementors are tempted into resizable, in-your-face, spiraling fonts, exploding dia-
log boxes, and background video clips from Haydn's Creation.

help n. A torrent of irrelevant information invoked by the FI key.

::::>Thetree-saving crusade to replace hard-copy documentation with on-line HYPER-
TEXT is vitiated by the fact that most users harbor a deep-rooted distrust of volatile
screen displays.

Henny Thumpman See KING OF TIffi ONE-LINE PATCHERS.

heuristics n. 1 The art of looking busy when seated at a terminal. 2 An

87
hexadecimal

upmarket problem-solving METHODOLOGY still seeking a worthy class of prob-

lems. 3 A formal approach to idle speculation.
=>"Giving strong technical advice for writing a good informal strategy is hard, due to
its informal nature. We think therefore that better ways of discovering objects, classes
and operations have to be found." (C. J. and A. Strohmeier, "An experience in teach-
ing OOD for Ada software," SEN, October 1990, ACM Press).

hexadecimal adj. Also called hexadismal. [Greek hexe "witch," whence

"evil spell" + Latin decem "ten."] Relating to a much-cursed method of alpha-
numerological counting, whereby two spiders can be dissected for the hell-
broth cauldron. Cordon Bleu hags intone 0 through 9 as they toss in the first
ten tarantulid tarsi; the remaining six stumps carry the mnemonical incanta-
tion A through F: "Azazel, Beelzebub, Cacodemon, Diablo, Eblis, Fiend."
=>Current DP usage retains the demonic, hexadecimal notation 0 to 9, A to F for the
bit patterns ‫סס‬oo to 1111, but William Barden, Jr. (TRS-BO Assembly Language
Programming, Radio Shack, 1979) has updated the mnemonic to: Actinium, Barium,
Curium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Fermium."

hiding, data n. [From hiding "a severe thrashing" + "data."] The inevitable
fate of your datums, however cunningly concealed. See also ENCAPSULATION

high-level language n. 1 Any of a set of acronyms devised by the manu-

facturer's marketing division. 2 A natural language purged of ambiguity and
semantics, but with compensatory punctuational and diacritical extensions
aimed at increasing the complexity of the syntactical structure. 3 A method of
slowing down the system to allow the innumerate to cope.

hirsute adj. Humorously endowed with a pleonasm of plethoric profundity,

i.e., HAIR.

hole n. 1 The space in a medium formerly occupied by a CHAD. 2 The result-

ing region of a Babbage wooden memory board when a knot-hole is reset. See
also NOT-; PUNCH.

hole, black, computing n. See SUPERCOMPUTER.

HOPL [Acronym for History Of Programming Languages.] A conference

organized by the ACM so that rival language designers can feign a three-day
friendship every ten years.

hot adj. (Of a chip) 1 Successful. 2 Unsuccessful. See PENTIUM.

=>By a Voltairean quirk of fate, the design of hot chips has kept pace with the design
of tiny fans and large sinks.

hot-point n. 1 The pixel-group just beyond the reach of your MOUSE. 2 The

88
 hypertext

Comdex booth featuring LaToya Jackson's "A Survey of ANSI C++

Exception-Handling Methodologies." See also CUCK.

however conj. Also called the big BUT. A disjunctive used to separate the
assertion of a proposition and the immediate assertion of its negation: "We
plan to market tomorrow; however, the FDIV subroutine still leaves much to
be desired." "We accept your quotation and performance estimates; however,
we await the results of the benchmark promised last June."

howler n. A solecism too gross and commonplace to excite the true

DORYPHORE.

~Let us not treat a misplaced diaeresis as a daughter lost:

"Howl, howl, howl, howl! 0, you are men of stones:
"Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
"That heaven's vault should crack ... "
(King Lear, act 5, scene 3)

Hungarian algorithm n. "First, pirate a copy of Borland C++ ... " See also
ETIlNOLOGY.

Hungarian notation n. The naming of variables using mnemonically data-

typifying prefixial agglutination.

=>Thus, hMessiah is a HANDLE, dwFooFoo is a double-word, szTring (pronounced

"string") is a null- (zero-) terminated sequence of characters, and sTring (pronounced
"shtring") is probably Pascalian. The incomparable status of Thomas Stephen Szasz
(l92~) is not affected.

hype n. Any document headed "For immediate release."

hyper- prefix [Greek hyper, "over and above."] A modifier, once certain to
hyperventilate the most Laconian Spartan, but now diluted by mindless appli-
cation. See also HYPERTEXT; M; VLSI.
=>"If 'super' be 'superfluous,' then 'hyper' be 'hyperfluous'" (John Philoponus).

hypertext n. A game played with a possibly empty set of text tiles each of
which (if any) contains zero or more characters and zero or more randomly
embedded pointers, some or all of which may be null. Each non-null pointer
(if any) points to a character (if any) in a text file (if any) or to another point-
er (if any). Players are given no prior information as to the structure or cyclic-
ity or absence thereof of the graphs established by the possibly void pointer
chains. The object (if any) of the game is to traverse and ingest the entire text-
set from pointer to pointer without losing your f***ing mind (if any).

89
hyphen

~Hypertext emerges as an unwitting vindication of both Derrida's deconstructionist

(compare with null-pointer dereferencing) hors-tute ("there is nothing outside the
text") and Barthes's post-structuralism ("writable [scriptible] text has no determinate
meaning ... but is a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through which the
critic may cut his [sic] own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no
sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual 'levels'to tell you what is
more or less significant.")S See also BROWSE.

hyphen n. The ultimate curse of typography, inappropriately dropped by edi-

torial whim or added (by your friendly syllable processor) to cope with finite
column widths.
~"Nature abhors the vacuum, and TIME (magazine) abhors the hyphen ... " (Anon).
Thus we endure the ugly "multiaccess" and the ambiguous "recreation" (as in "recre-
ate" a file: come on file, time for walkies ... ). The AFUCIO call to "unionize," as noted
by Renata Holland, can appear as the chemist's "un-ionize." Is your "prescience" pre-
scientific? Did you "codecease" spousally, as required by the Pm, or did your program
abort? "Codetermination" is no help here. The usage needs "codification," not to be
confused, as if, with "codeification."
Spurious hyphens are also dangerous. Computer magazines with narrow column
formats are especially vulnerable, often inserting hyphens in command lines, program
identifiers, and e-mail addresses that can drive the innocent reader insane.
The wiser Welsh-language hyphenators formally distinguish the cyslltnod (con-
necting mark) and the cyplysnod (coupling mark), which helps both phonetically, as
stress indicators, and etymologically. Thus, "slaughterhouse," l/add-dy avoids the ugly,
ambiguous cluster ddd and reveals the origins (lladd "kill" and t[dlY "house"). Welsh
hyphens also playa semantic role: bendigedig means "blessed, wonderful," but writ-
ing it as ben-di-ged-ig adds the superlative touch, "0 My God, how blessed can you
getT' (Robert A. Fowkes, "Teithi'r Iaith," Ninnau 19, no 2 [December 1993]).
Consider the appalling "cocitation," without which no book on Bibliometrics can
survive. This naughty eye (et Ie bon!), despite Miltonic side-effects, sees some possi-
bly illegal hanky-panky. But the Welsh "co.." prefix cyd insists on a hyphen: cyd-ddyn
for "fellow man." En passant, "hanky-panky" and similar "jingle-jangle" collocations,
carry hyphens in both Welsh and English. For example, "helter-skelter" is marvelous-
ly rendered as strim·stram·st~llach. See also LEXICAL SCOPE.

S. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1983).

90
I
Ibid Ben Passim (?35-?100 D.C.E.) The oft-quoted Eastern scholar.

IBM [pre-1981.] n. [International Business Machines Corporation.] Also

called Itty Ditty Machines, Snow White, The VS Pioneer, The Lawyer's
Friend. The dominant force in computer marketing, having, worldwide, sup-
plied some 75 percent of all known hardware and 10 percent of all known
software. To protect itself from the litigious envy of less successful organiza-
tions, such as the U.S. government, IBM employs 68 percent of all known ex-
attorneys general.
~An IBM watcher writes: "I am often asked to explain IBM's leading position in data
processing. My reply, in a word, infallibility. No cheap tricks or gimmicks. No loss-
making innovations. Just honest-to-goodness, expensive infallibility. If IBM's rivals-
formerly called the Seven Dwarfs, with Univac as Doc and Telex as Grumpy, but now
more accurately referred to as the Seven Hundred Midgets-would only eschew their
fruitless, vindictive crusades against the one, true, everlasting orthodoxy and attend to
their own blatant fallibilities, we would see fewer fatalities in the DP marketplace." See
also ABM; FS; THINK SIGN.

IBM [1981-1993.] A sad victim of its own successful open PC architecture. A

DP Historian (limited to one sentence) writes: "The masters of the unclonable
mainframe with proprietary operating systems failed to predict that Intel and
Microsoft would quickly convert the noddy 6MHz, segmented-address 8088
running DietPlan under CP/M into a screaming-hot 66MHz, large linear-
memory PENTIUM multi-database server running under Windows NT."
~" ... how are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Armonk; publish it not in the streets of
Poughkeepsie; lest the daughters of the Gates rejoice ...•• (2 Samuel 1:20, New MS
Translation).

See also oS/2; MICROSOFT.

IBM [post-I993.] No longer the old monopolistic dreadnought, but a rejuve-

nated, optimistic fleet of slim cruisers each able independently to dodge the
minefields at the risk of occasional inter-squadron collisions. A DP Seer pre-
dicts: "Having admitted 'OEM' into its vocabulary and forged allegiances
with former enemies to fight the real foe, IBM's survival seems assured.
Whether the decision to offer OS/2 for Windows at $49.95 (with a $39.95
screen-saver thrown in for free), turns out to promote OS/2 sales or depress
the Windows market, remains to be seen ...••

ICARUS n. [Acronym for Infallible, Comprehensive, And Running User

Software.] A software house that aimed too high and was mortally singed. See
also VAPORWARE.

91
ICL

::::)Thestaff made redundant by the ICARUS dive have both forsaken the cruel world
of computing and are now working for DEC.

ICL [International Computers Ltd.] \pronounced "I see hell'" See also
ETHELRED.

Icon n. [Origin: either Greek eikon "an image, esp. one held to be sacred;' or
possibly from the song "Anything you can do, Icons do better ... "] 1
(Computer books) The front-cover picture of John C. Dvorak or Peter Norton.
2 (GUI) An illiterate PROMPT; a SEMIOTIC retrogression. See also TRASH CAN.
::::)Iconoclastsdecry the outrageous, GRAND GUIGNOL attempt to replace a crisp, unam-
biguous, text-based command-line syntax with a quilt of grunting caveman pictograms.
Overnight, they assert, we have undone the hard-gained evolution in linguistic sophis-
tication from primitive glyphs. via Linears A, B, C, P, and L, to the majesty of phonetic
syllabaries and alphabets. Further, if GUIcon designers persist in litigating to keep
their little pixel-clumps private and proprietary. then the claimed semantic universali-
ty and immediacy of icons flies out the Window. Incidentally, there may be a lesson in
the fact that the Mayan glyphs, which were originally open, widely understood but
non-phonetic symbols, proved more difficult to decipher than the secret, priestly
Egyptian hieroglyphs that had acquired a phonetic structure. The emerging generation
of computer users is more likely to be familiar with disk files than with manila folders
and filing cabinets, so an icon-metaphor that explains the former in terms of the latter
proves to be a quaint anachronism. Why not have antimacassar icons to signify the
presence of a diskette write-protection tab?

Ideal Business Machine n. A sublime, cost-no-object VTMI (Very Total

Management Information) system being developed for the 1999 Meanman-
Narkus personal computer catalog.
::::)Thearchitecture is the joint responsibility of von Neumann and Thring assisted by
Wilkes, Eckert, Mauchly, Hartree, Cray, Amdahl, Babbage. Williams. Leibnitz. and
Pascal. based on Carver Mead components supplied by English Eclectic. Analog
options are by Mike Godfrey. The systems and applications software team includes
Gill, Knuth, Strachey, Hopper, Stroustrup. Ritchie, Thompson. Kernighan, Wirth,
McCarthy, Dijkstra, Newell, Simon. Minsky. Wheeler, Arbib, Popplestone, Winograd,
van Wijngaarden. Backus, Naur. Kleene, Lukasiewicz, Iverson, Landin. Hoare. floyd,
Chomsky, Scott. Park, Peterson, Michaelson, Michie. Steele. Tarski, me, and Shannon.
Project Director is Lord flowers, helped by Oppenheimer. Hartley, Teffier,
Goldstine, and Wotan. Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein. and Dylan Thomas are han-
dling the documentation (a much-needed blend of wit, fantasy, and precision).
Bill Gates, T. J. Watson. Sr., Billy Graham, and Steve Jobs are running the market-
ing division. while N. Bonaparte heads up field service. Site preparation is in the expe-
rienced hands of G. Khan. P. Kahn. Capability Brown, and A. Le N6tre.
Fully comprehensive. bundled, and infallible packages have been ordained in a
newly resurrected ALGOL++ by our shit-hot package kings, Buddha, Shiva,

92
 Identifier

Mahomet, and Christ (proprietary rights fully protected). The other two major high-
level languages, EV-LISP and EVQ.LISP are also supported.
Initial master file data will be keyed in by K. Marx and verified by F. Engels. A real
Meanman-Narkus coup has been the signing of A. Einstein and H. Poincare to oversee
the file-maintenance group (any three of the nine muses, according to availability). The
day-to-day data-entry team has been recruited from the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders,
trained by Minerva, and supervised by Pope John Paul II and the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini.
An all-Greek squad of factory-trained operators will be provided, comprising of
(sic) Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, trWTf!, under the watchful eye of GUI whiz-kid Zeus.
On-line prognostics are guaranteed by the Delphic Service Center.
The total up-and-running ballpark end-user price has not yet been announced, but
is likely to be high. But when was the best ever cheap? Also, some slippage timewise
has been mooted. But when were such experts ever able to agree? The lengthy stand-
off between Zeus and Shiva over character sets has been particularly annoying to the
lets-ship-next-quarter crowd. But when was the best not worth waiting for, indefinite-
ly if need be?

Identifier n. A string devised to obscure the program's semantics. "Today we

have the 'Naming of the VARs'" (Army Programming Lecture).
~J. B. Priestly once observed that from the moment "Enter Ophelia" is written, the
playwright is in the hands of a blonde who is sleeping with the producer. Likewise, a
programmer declaring Net_Income as double immediately saddles a chunk of
memory with extraneous semantic baggage well beyond its machine-specific floating-
point representation. Subsequent code, for all we know, might dictate that

Net_Income = Gross_Income + Deductions;

leading some to view "identifiable identifiers" as a mixed blessing. Parnassian fields,
named (by me) for D. L. Parnas ("On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems
into Modules," Communications of the ACM 5, no. 12 [December 1972]) are deliber-
ately non-mnemonic. Parnas would prefer the arbitrary AI, X3, etc., as forced on us
by early BASICs. Maintainabilty, he claims, which depends on understanding what the
code actually does, should never rely on the "natural language" interpretation of
Net_Income as someone's net income.
An onomaticonian writes: "Close to the theme of maintaining legacies are the inter-
esting shifts in identifier-naming fashions. Over the code-forsaken years, I've been
compiling lists of bizarre variable and function names encountered in programs, both
mine and others'. In the Modula-2 FileSystem module, for example, there's a SET OF
Hag data type called HagSet, and I could never resist declaring

VAR Kirsten: FlagSet;

Even when upper-case and maxLen VarString restrictions eased for many language/OS
combinations (the jump from 2 to 6 was particularly memorable with wild dancing in
the streets of Dartmouth), the old miserly habits often persisted, leading to some risi-
ble overloading. The table on pp. 94-95 lists some of the polysemous substrings that
can perplex the maintainer.

93
IdentItIer

Thble or Substrings
Substring Meanings and Examples
alt alternative (AltVar); altitude (VarAlt); alteration
bit built; blit; bacon-lettuce-tomato
cap capital-capitalization (CapDeO; ceiling (CapCall
(LowToCap)
cat catalog; category; (con)catenate (Unix); feline
check test; marJc6 .
const constant; constructor
corr correction (ConCorr); correlation (ConCorr)
cur current (GetCurCur); cursor (GetCurC,:"");canine
db database; decibel
dec decrement; decimal; Digital Equipment Corp.
def define (defunc); defunct; deficit; default (DetFunc); definite
(Deflnt[egral))
diag diagnosis; diagonal
firm agreed/settled (FirrnQuote); company (FirmName)
han handle; handler7
ind index (lndTab); indent (lndTab)
int integer (IntReO; integrity (Reflnt); integral-calculus (Deflnt); inter-
val (Deflntlnt)
inv invoice (InvTot); invalid (InvTot); invert (InvMat); inverse (InvLog)
If linefeed; logical font (Windows)
In natural log; link; line
log log-file (ErrorLog); log (LogOn); logarithm (logX); logical
(LogError); "loss of generality'"
man manual-method (ManIP); manual-book (ProgMan); manager (prog-
man); male
mat matrix (TransMat); material (TransMat)
mess message (ClearMess); mess/garbage (ClearMess)
min minute (time); minimum
000 orderlbilling; order/ordinal
org origin/cartesian; original9; orgasm (GetBrushOrg); organisation;
organism

6. As in CheckMenuItem ( ) • a toggle that also "unchecks."

7. A sequence that puzzles at first glance is the Borland OWL function. even than ( ) • which one
read. llJI """ ••n than" hut which h1m~ nut tn M an "" ••nt handl••r.
8. As in ''wlog. we can assume that ...••• meaning ''without loss of generality ....•• Often. though.
the following assumption demands a huge gain in particularity. leading cynics to take the ''w'' as
''with.'' Compare ''wa'' = with average.
9. Thus OrgOrg means the original coordinate origin. To add to the confusion. org sometimes
means "previous."

94
 "
post temporal (PostProcess); transactional (PostMessage); mail (PostIt).
ps pointer-to-string; postscript; process-status (Unix)
ref reference (IntRef); referential (RefInt)
rep repeat; representative; repository
res resource; result; resolution; reserve; restore
sec second (time); secant
set collection (FlagSet); assignment (SetFlag)
str string; strict; struct; street; strip
sub subtract; subscription; subsidiary; subscript-font
sz size (StringSz); zero-tenninated string (HUNGARIAN NarATlON:
szString)
tab table (IndTab); tabulate/indent (IndTab)
tm textmetric (Windows); trademark.; transcendental meditation
trans transpose; transport
val value; valid (ValValChk);
var variable; variance; value-added reseller
win window (FailWin); victory (WinWin) cf. Nelson's WinMainO.

If conj. 1 (Poetic) Kiplingian milestones on the road to mandelayhood and

gambler's ruin. 2 (CS) One of many conditional control-flow obstacles faced
by a process linearly anxious to complete the next instruction without tire-
some, trivial, testing diversions.
~Some programmers see if as the soul of machine intelligence. Thus,

if (CurBankBal <= 0) errmsg("Spendthrift scoundrel!M);

else exit(O);

forms the core of many a smart, ethical money manager. The home-exit loving, non-
judgmental process, however, reluctantly forced to test transient bits of registers, is
tempted to rule in favor of else. Baudelaire predicts these nuances in Les Hiboux:
"Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent. ... " In some computer languages, a nested if is ter-
minated with endif or the more attractive, Shakespearean mirror-image, fi. The ifs
in procedural computer languages are followed by BOOLEanexpressions that reduce at
runtime to TRUE or FALSE. Logical implication is replaced by material implication:
TRUE implies that the then clause (possibly empty) is obeyed, while FALSE triggers
the else clause (also possibly empty). Note that we lose the asymmetry of logical
implication (true implies true, but false implies anything), and you are free to inter-
change FALSE and TRUE: they are essentially arbitrary attributes with no semantic
significance. You are equally free to switch your then and else clauses.
C is rather different. The interesting quirk with C, in the absence of a dedicated
Boolean type, is that zero is Boolean FALSE, while nonzero is TRUE. An expression
such as (1 ! = 1), which most would regard as patently false, does indeed evaluate
to zero; (2 == 2) evaluates to the integer I, which is abundantly nonzero and emi-
nently true.

95
Iff

The interesting point is that FALSE is single-valued (I exclude the metaphysics of

null pointers, huge, near, and far) while TRUE is legion. There may be a Zarathustrian
strand here: the diabolical equivalence of all dark lies contrasting with a billion points
of light? However, when you want a function to return TRUE for success and FALSE
for failure, a perfectly natural, dare 1 say, intuitive ploy, you hit a snag. Success is a
one-of-a-kind blessing, failure comes in whole battalions. To have the function return
an instructive error code, it is necessary to rephrase the question pessimistically: Did
the function fail? Yes, TRUE! Why did it fail? Test the nonzero return value:

if ( e = f () ) { I I did f () fail ?
switch (e) { II why?
case 1: II one reason for failure

case 2:11 and another

case n:11 no end?

break;

}
II success
Some see life itself as a huge case statement. See also EVENT-DRIVEN.

Iff 1 [abbrev. "if and only if."] "A iff B" means not only that "A if B" (B
implies A, so B is a sufficient condition for A) but also that "A only if B" (A
implies B, so B is necessary condition for A). The prevalent confusion
between the statements "A if B, "B if A," and "A iff B," is, echoing Maxwell
Smart's ControVChaos crises, the major threat ~ocivilization as we know it.
Thus, if A = "it is sweet" and B = "it is sugar:' then "A if B." So, sugarity is a
sufficient condition for sweetness. However, sugarity is not a necessary con-
dition for sweetness, since there are many non-sugar substances that are
(nutra)-sweet. From B we can impute A, but from A we cannot indict B. In
everyday domestic discourse, the threat "I'll kill you if you say that again,"
should be countered by a calm request to clarify the spelling of "if."
~A non-tenured logician writes "My salary is necessary but not sufficient." David
GrieslO tells the following story:

'The notation iff is used for 'if and only if.' A few years ago, while lecturing in
Denmark, 1 usedfifinstead, reasoning that since 'if and only if' was a symmetric con-
cept its notation should be symmetric also. Without knowing it, 1 had punned in Danish
and the audience laughed. for fifin Danish means 'a little trick.' 1 resolved thereafter
to use fif so 1 could tell my little joke, but my colleagues talked me out of it."

10. David Gries, The Science of Programming (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1981).

96
 IMP

2 [abbrev. Identification Friend or Foe.] A key aim of the UK radar systems

deployed during World War II.
=>It is worth noting that in addition to the hush-hush Turing-Newman Enigma code·
breaking exploits at Bletchley Park, the computer age owes much to the digital-pro-
cessing radar techniques developed in the 19405. [Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs of a
Computer Pioneer (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985.)

IMP n. [Acronym for Integrated Morticians Package © ICARUS.] A compre-

hensive, heart-warming package which has literally buried the competition
after prolonged, in-depth trials at the Lombard Happy-Landing Chapel of
Sweet Repose, Gardena. California.
=>The IMP package is a real eye-opener, and a lesson to less lively vertical markets in
the proper exploitation of such modem DP techniques as postmortem dumps, drag' n' -
drop, and decompilation. We quote from the ICARUS brochure Stretching Your
Bereavement Processing Dollar (1994 edition):
"The cult-independent IMP package is written in racy, portable, uncontroversial
MID1RAN: ('For He shall choose between the QUIKTRAN and the DEAD-
TRAN.' [St. Presper, Epistolary Update to the Algolites. level IX, release viii))."
IMP's truly revelationary documentation will take you painlessly, step by joyous step,
through the once-irksome keening cycle.
Say goodbye to digging holes and punching cards!
Shoutfarewell to unsightly chadim on your vestments!
Scream adieu to clay on your boots!
Yell no-more to unjustified memorial epigraphy!
IMP offers the Lor! IMP prepares the Lor! IMP consecrates the Lor! Check out
the advantages!
Only IMP gives you:
Full pre- and post-need casket accounting
On-line floral tributation
Next-of-kin mailing shots
Obituarial word processing
Probate litigation (normal or noncontingency)
Retrospective Living Trusts
Will-call validation
Realtime corpse count
Interment logistics and plot plotting
Armband inventory control
Reusable coffins via nondestructive crematorial temperature gradients
Automatic tombstone engraving (choice of 15 Gothic fonts)

97
Impersonal computing

Jazz bands (New Orleans branch only-"When the Saints": $50 surcharge)
Internet seances (subject to domain accessibility)
Firecrackers (optional)
Hertz Rent-a-Hearse network
Pre-need enrollment and training
Cosmetics (departed and departee)
Cryogenics or mummification to persistencize your dear ones
Cross-religion hymn selection menus
Cross-deity placations
Creative condolences (with optional personalization)
Computer-aided design (mausolea, caskets, cuisine, etc.)
FREE repeat business voucher (valid for 3 days)
Alilistingslinviteslinvoices in tasteful HAMLET-black
PLUS PLUS PLUS ... the real killer:
The Merry Survivor option!!!
A discreet, no-questions-asked COMPU-DATETM service offering confidential, com-
puter-matched social introductions for the semi-inconsolable!
IMP carefully vets all post-funereal dates!
NO boring fortune hunters!
NO overrated gigolos!
NO dumb gold diggers (unless box 47 checked)
NO racial, religious, or sexual prejudice (unless box 89 checked)
The Merry Survivor option keeps YOU, the mortician, in an ongoing, profitable situ-
ation with otherwise transitory clients.

Impersonal computing n. Routine, run-of-the-mill commercial data pro-

cessing, in which the scrawled schedules Scotch-taped to the console have not
been changed for three years. Compare PERSONAL COMPUTING.

Implementation n. The fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to

fulfill promises made by the rich and ignorant.

Implementatlon-dependent adj. (Of a STANDARD requirement) non-stan-

dard; worse than unpredictable; much loved by implementors.
:::>Cobbler, heal thyself! There seems to be no standard set of terms in the standards
lexicon. The ANSI C standard uses implementation-defined for non-portable features
or actions left to the "whim of whomever." However, conforming implementations
shall publicly document such quirks. Standards use shall, by the way, with Levitical
regularity. Note that a strictly conforming implementation shall eschew implementa-
tion-defined features. Or ELSE!

98
 Inheritance

INCA [It's Not Called APL] An APL derivative from Manugistics introducing
such avant-garde horrors as objects, hierarchical name spaces, right-to-Ieft
parsing, C-type primitives, and, the ultimate heresy, structured flow-control
mechanisms. See also RECURSIVE ACRONYM; GNU.

Inch worm n. One engaged in spurious quantification on a small scale.

~ Inch worm, inch worm, measuring your marigolds,
You and your arithmetic will probably go far;
Inch worm, inch worm, measuring your marigolds,
Seems to me you should stop and see
How beautiful they are. II
Compare FOOT WORM; NUMEROLATRY.

Incompleteness theorem n. 1 Formal systems theory A theorem estab-

lishing the incompleteness of a certain set of axioms, as: "The second-order
predicate calculus is incomplete (K. GOOel [1931]). 2 Informal systems theo-
ry The empirically unimpeachable fact that at least one vital element in the
system will not be delivered, as: "Where's the ****ing power lead?" (M.
Thumps [1976]).

Indirection n. The leap of faith from address to contents, from POINTER to

POINTEE. See also DEREFERENCE; HANDLE.

Inferenclng adj. (Of an engine) inferring with a 22.22 percent overhead. See
also IF; MARGIE. Compare METHODOLOGY.

~ Yet another example of M' AS-TIJ-VU syllable-bloat. From the verbal forms "infer,
inferred, inferring" comes the noun "inference" (the act of inferring), whence a
sequence of IF-THEN statements dressed-to-sell as an "inferencing engine." Such
devices have done little to resolve the bitter-long arguments as to whether "infer"
means "hint, suggest, surmise" or "derive by sound reasoning." To update an old apho-
rism: "Inferencings are made, implicationings are discovered."

Infinity n. More than enough, as in 640 KB (1980) or 4 GB (1990).

~ "Is not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite?" (Job 22:5 KJV).

Inheritance n. 1 1\vo of the seven pillars of OBrncr ORIENTEERING. The other

five are ENCAPSULATION, POLYMORPHISM, and BRADY GOOCH. 2 (For
OOPstarters) a mechanism for deriving sports cars from baser modes of trans-
portation.

II. 'The Inch Worm" from Hans Christian Andersen by Frank Loesser. @ 1951, 1952 Frank
Music Corp. @ Renewed 1979, 1980 Frank Music Corp. International Copyright secured. All
Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

99
In-house

=>There are now more OOP books than objects, and most of them confuse taxonomic
("is a") and meronymic ("part of') inheritances. Does the derived class "specialize" by
adding and overriding base members, or does it "refine" the base by removing impu-
rities? St Paul's answer: " ... neither doth corruption inherit incorruption" (I
Corinthians 15:50 KJV).
Neo-Freudian standup comic: "Why is the class hierarchy a barren concept?
Because the private members are not inherited!"

In-house adj. [Origin: "Is there a doctor in-house?"-traditional appeal to a

theater audience.] Relating to any job that the user's staff can screw up with-
out outside help. Compare OUTSOURCED.

Inslnnuendo n. [Origin: Malapudlianism (Scouse dialect, Liverpool, for

malapropistic portmanteau) from insinuate + innuendo.] The oblique implica-
tion that a certain feature or device is available as a result of its being named
in a specification, proposal, or quotation.

Install v. [Etym. obscure: possibly from prefix in and stall, either "evasive,
deceitful delay," or "a cattle-shed reeking of stale, piss-ridden straw."] The
first command required of the neophyte USER and, by SOD'S LAW, the one most
likely to freeze the system. See also UNlNSTALL.
=>The more creative install programs not only crash after the sixteenth floppy has
been inserted, but also re-write essential ini files in order to inhibit rebootage.
Polite versions have been known to advise the user to "Grab a coffee or two," or
even "Tlus is a good time to watch a movie or two; Fritz Lang's Nibelungen trilogy is
highly recommended."

Instance n. See INSTANTIATION.

Instantiation n. 1Object-orienteering The birth of a CLASS instance, that is,

an OBJECT saddled with the diverse data members ordained for that class, and
the methods trained to corrupt them. 2 Beverages The reduction of various
plants to their time-saving, inorganic substitutes.
=>In the vast OOP tutorial literature, instantiations invariably betray egotistical decla-
rations. Thus, the profusion of subjective objects:
MyWindow TWindoWi
MyWay TWaYi
MonDieu TDieu;
MeinKampf TKampfi
Alas, before the parent classes and FRIENDS can light their cigars, destructive caducity
strikes: out of scope, out of luck.

Integral adj. (Of a solution) accurate to the nearest whole number, as: ''The
PENTIUM has an integral fPU."

100
 Internet

Intellectual property n. Law An expensive, on-going, possibly oxymoron-

ic, attempt to solve the mind-matter problem. "Who would have thought that
'NBC' and 'intellectual property' would ever occur in the same sentence?" (D.
Letterman disputing the ownership of the phrase 'The Tonight Show").
~Distinguishing between creative cerebral activity and its recordable, copyable, and
protectable manifestations remains an intractable legal and technological challenge.
Be warned, though, that I have archived my brain-wave graphs, both sleep and wake,
and preserved all my shopping lists since birth. Any infringement in whole or part,
conscious or otherwise, on these declared embodiments constitutes a grave Casus
Melvin Belli. See also PATENT.

IntelllSense™ "It's built-in technology that senses what you want to do and
produces the desired result." (MICROSOFT advert). (Submitted by a puzzled
Mitchell McConnell.)
~Those who believe in Chairman Bill's total prescience (hyphen optional) are puz-
zled by the need for explicit sensing. Our unfolding requirements are surely preknown
and can be satisfied autoexecutably each time we power up. IntelliSense also has
important consequences in the discontinuant and cessational environments. Prior
knowledge of your impending Ctrl+C or Break provides the application with diverse
salvific strategies. See GATES, WILLIAM.

Interface n. & v. trans. [Origin: Possible contraction of "In your face."]

Mandatory usage: seamless interface. 1 n. An arbitrary line of demarcation
set up in order to apportion the blame for malfunctions. 2 v. trans. To redesign
(two working subsystems) so that they can go wrong symbiotically. See also
GUI.

Internet n. The anarchic mother of all networked networks, dedicated to the

memory and upholding the aims of the Catalan and Basque insurgents in the
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
~"Mother" is to be taken here in the Black-American elliptical sense. Apart from a
few O'Reilly & Associates authors, nobody really understands or needs to know how
Internet works (stretching the word "works" beyond its usual semantic web).
Individual users are content to acquire access via a chain of generous nodal gateways,
each of which mayor may not form part of the user's Internet "address." The Catch-
22 is that inter-communication is rarely possible until either party has successfully
reached the other. A typical Internet message, therefore, consists of a two-page head-
er listing each store-and-forward gateway routing (with many disconcerting
"Apparently-to" strings), followed by a plaintive one-liner: "Let me know if you don't
receive this."
Reaching out to touch someone electronically is further complicated by the coex-
istence of Internet and UUCPNET (uunet) addressing protocols. The former has the
pattern name@site.domain while the latter uses the so-called BANG notation:

101
Interoperabllity

uunet!site.domain!name. The site and domain fields may be extended to reflect the
chain of intermediate gateways. Suffice it to note that your importance in the e-mail
food-chain is, in general, inversely proportional to the total length of your accessible
address. Thus, as the UNIX Review Avocado Diaboli, I am beast!stan, Bjarne
Stroustrup is bs@research, the Trinity is god!god!god and Mahomet is m@islam.mil.
More at TNHD under "Internet address."

Interoperablllty n. An octosyllabic drain on Press Release productivity.

Interpreter n. 1 (Human) "One who enables two persons of different lan-
guages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been
to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said" (Ambrose Bierce). 2
(Computer) One that is quick to chide but slow to run. See also COMPILER.

Introspect n. A VIRTUAL prospect added to forecasts in order to placate sales

management and remove the finiteness restriction from the TRAVELING SALES-
PERSON PROBLEM.

Intultlvlty n. (Preferred DP form for intuition and intuitiveness) Innate user

knowledge prior to reading the manuals. See also RlFM.
~Thus, in TAPCIS, Shift-F7 and "!" both give "print with form-feed" while "." gives
"print with no form-feed."

10 n. [Origin obscure: from Greek io! "a shout of joy following the success-
ful mounting of a cow," or, possibly, abbreviation for Input/Output.] The
Alpha and Omega of computing, and the only two aspects thereof that the
layperson understands and desires. Unfortunately, the DP professional inter-
venes with Beta through Psi. If Omega should be reached, the cry "10" is
raised, initiating a prolonged bacchanal.

IOU n. \pronounced I owe you\ [Input/Output Unit.] A promissory instrument

that is rarely honored. See also 10.

Irish search n. See BEST-LAST SEARCH; ETHNOLOGY.

IRQ \pronounced irk.\ Interrupt Request-ill-timed and invariably disdained.

Irregular verbs In addition to the irregular conjugations found in Standard

English (e.g., I am, you are, he is), DP English has generated local deviant
conjugations of interest to the sociolinguist.

102
 Irregule, ".,.,.

Table 01 Irregular Verbs

I construct algorithms
You program
He/she uses Visual BASIC

I consult
You freelance
He/she moonlights

I chart
You code
He/she runs

I was with IBM

You were with UNIVAC
He/she was with NCR
They were with Ashton-Tate

I refine
You debug
He/she patches
They kludge

I assemble
You compile
He/she/it interprets

I market
You sell
He/she peddles

I manufacture
You sell
He/she suffers

I heurist
You try and err
He/she flounders

I interact
You timeshare
He/she hogs

103
IRS

I extrapolate
You conjecture
He/she guesses

I was Turing
You were Thring
He/she Tured

I verify
You punch
He/she joggles

I curtate
You truncate
He/she shortens

IRS n. [Internal Revision Service.]

~Each year the IRS meets with AUGRATIN (Amalgamated Union of General Rewriters,
Amenders, Tinkerers, and INterpolators) to determine which changes in the withhold-
ing algorithms will cause the maximum dislocation to existing PAYROLL packages.
Experience has shown that it is the small, apparently insignificant variations in the tax-
iomatic schema that create more havoc and consultancy fees than any major recasting
of the income-truncation METHODOLOGY. Mooted changes are tested on the joint
IRS/AUGRATIN Cray Mk.II, which holds models of over 7000 payroll implementa-
tions, and refined to maximize conversion cost.

ISAM file n. [Acronym for Intrinsically Slow Access Method or (rare)

Indexed Sequential Access Method.] One of the most successful data-securi-
ty systems so far devised. Information is protected from all but the most per-
sistent, patient, and devious.

ISDN See SARCONYM.

ISO n. [Origin: possibly Greek iso "equal" but now presumed acronym for
International Standards Organization.] A meta-standards organization set up
in 1947 in order to establish standards for the setting up of standard organiza-
tions. See also ANSI; ASCII; STANDARD.
~Having failed in this exordial assignment, and in order to regain some credibility
among the growing number of national standards bodies (for each emerging nation, it
seems, considers itself not fully emerged until it has an airline, ethnic strife, and a stan-
dards association), ISO directed its taxonomic skills to the creation of a standard for toi-
let seats, to which end a widely spaced sample of assholes was recruited and exposed
to the mensurational rigors of statistical humiliation. This ongoing (in both senses of the
word) project is likely to be vitiated by the arrival on earth of extraterrestrial globs with
nonstandard excretive methodologies.

104
J
J n. Ken Iverson's more elegant, more powerful, more ASCII, less scrutable
son-of-APL.
:;;;;>Some
see the language J (unrelated to The Book of J) as Mao-tse-Ken's Cultural
Revolution, but one played out on an uninhabited, off-shore Taiwanese island. See
Murray Eisenberg and Howard A. Peelie, "Confessions of Two APL Educators
Learning J," APL'93 Conference Proceedings. APL Quote Quad. 24, no. I (August
1993). See also APL; MISFILED BOOKS.

JANUS n. [Acronym for JANuary Updating Service.] See DECADE COUNTER.

JARGON file n. An on-line hackers' glossary-thesaurus originated and main-

tained at SAIL (Stanford AI Laboratory) and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) by Mark Crispin, Raphael Finkel, Guy L. Steele Jr., and Donald
Woods, with assistance from the MIT and Stanford AI communities and
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This definitive repository of programming
wit and folklore was published on real paper to great acclaim in 1983 as THO
(The Hacker's Dictionary [The MIT Press)). Reflecting changes in the ever-
volatile OP culture and lexicon, TNHO (The New Hacker's Dictionary), also
from MIT Press, appeared in 1990, compiled by Eric S. Raymond, with a
foreword and zany, Crunchly, ad-hackery cartoons by Guy L. Steele Jr. A sec-
ond edition, TNHO-2, quickly followed (1993) with over 250 new entries.
Matching the fame of K&R, TNHD is also known as R&S.
:;;;;>Entriesfrom the original Jargon file are reproduced with the permission of the
above-mentioned compilers. Legends such as See also TNHO mandate inspection of the
indicated urtext.

JCL n. [Job Control Language.] A deliberately abstruse software barrier

between the USER and the OPERATING SYSTEM, set up to prevent ordinary pro-
grammers from running their own programs.
:;;;;>As
the name partly implies, JCL was devised to create jobs for otherwise displaced
intellectuals, and to thwart the gloomy predictions of computer-induced unemploy-
ment made in the 19508.

job trickle n., also (archaic) job stream. The system's attempt to match the
rate of execution to the programmer's coding rate.
Jobs' Comforters [from Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Corporation and
foundernoser of NeXT Inc.] 1 Canon Corporation. 2 Sun Microsystems Inc.
See also NEXT.

105
John Birch machine

~ntly, NeXT Inc. has cleverly eschewed loss-certain hardware in favor of loss-
possible software.
John Birch machine n. [From M. A. Arbib, 1969.] A finite-state machine
in which the tape moves to the right after each computation.

Jolt Award n. [From Jolt™, an explosively caffeinated "soft" drink much

favored by all-night programmers.] The software-developers' Oscar, launched
in 1991 by Larry O'Brien (editor, Miller-Freeman's Computer Language
Magazine, now called Software Development).
~As on Hollywood's academe, the Jolt categories are yearly becoming increasingly
bizarre, combining particularity and universality to ensure that everyone wins. Thus,
to mirror "Best French Movie Not Starring Any Depardieux," we have "Least
Offensive OUI Builder Running In Under 8 MB."

106
K
K prefix [Kilo-.] I Science IQ3-fold, as: "40K brothers/Could not, with all
their quantity of 10ve,IMake up my sum" (Hamlet). 2 Finance 21O-fold, pr0-
viding a hidden 2.4 percent hedge against impoverishment. Compare M.
~Computer sales proposals operate in both environments and tend to fluctuate
between the two K modes without proper warning. When in doubt, you should assume
the worst case, e.g., "Each additional 8K of memory will cost $IK," means you get
8000 bits for $1024, whereas "We offer to buy back each surplus 8K memory board
for $1 K" should be taken as an offer of $1000 for 8192 longwords.

K&R n. Also K&&R. A reverential reference to Brian W. Kernighan and

Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language (Prentice-Hall, 1978). See
also C; R&S; HELLO, WORLD.
~In the Ascn encodement, 'K' =
]001011 and 'R' = 10100]0, so some literally bit-
wise idiots take K & R to be ]‫סס‬oo10, which, alas, is the ASCD value for 'B'. The more
logical approach is K && R which evaluates to TRUE.

KBMT n. (Knowledge-based Machine Translation) The long-overdue attempt

to improve MT by supplying some appropriate facts about the source and tar-
get languages. See also NLP.
~In spite of copious multilingual databases, the SYSTRAN KBMT service offered by
the EEC (European Economic Community) continues to confuse and divide its mem-
bers: "Les agriculteurs vis avis de la politique agricole commune ...•• reached the
English bureaucrats as "farmers live to screw the common agricultural policy ... " A
clear case of In MT veritas. "Nous avions" came out as "we airplanes."

kernel n. [Etym. OE cymel, a little corn.] Preferred DP spelling kemal, as

in Kernal Data Systems, Pleasanton, Calif. The os seedling lurking inside the
SHELL.

~Old-so]diering UNIX farts are fond of the World War I song: "If you want to hack the
kernel, I know where it is, I know where it is ...••

keyword n. Also called reserved word. An identifier with prescribed syntax

and semantics, so don't argue.
~ Whether NL has any keywords is an open question.

kibitzer n. [Yiddish kibits'r "onlooker, meddler."] The maddening stranger

who leans over your shoulder and whispers "Your Queen is en prise" or "You
missed a 'p' in 'append,'''
~ With the OUI invasion, a new breed of kibitzer has appeared who dares to fondle your
mouse while you are typing.

107
king of the one-line patchers

king of the one-line patchers. Byname for Henny Thumpman (1906-),

stand-up programmer and court jester for Jewish Business Machines, and enu-
merator of such overexposed catch strings as: "I love this environment"; 'l'ake
my system!"; "That you call a callback?" 'The 586, but for you, 585.99927";
"Compatible, schcompatible, so you wanna hold up progress?"; "My wife's
so dumb, she wants that syntax should increase by 10 percent!"

kludge n. & v. trans., also called kluge [Possibly from Yiddish klug "smart,"
or Polish kluczka, a trick or hook.] \preferred pronunciation klooj.\ I n. The
programmers' vaseline. 2 n. A retrograde step in a STEPWISE REFINEMENT. 3 n.
[From JARGON FILE.] Something that works for the wrong reasons. 4 v. trans.
To fix (a problem) quickly and dirtily by applying a kludge. See also BUG;
ONE-LINE PATCH; PTF. More at TNHD.

=*There is no dispute concerning the meaning and usefulness of kludgellduge in the

electronics and computer trades, although many lay dictionaries sadly mislead.
However, even within the DP laxicon, its spelling, pronunciation, etymology and cita-
tionography are still delightfully controversial. 12 A Yiddish, rather than Teutonic, /dug
is the preferred origin in order to explain the obvious irony: ''That you call smart?"
The sound of the final "g," of course, can readily fricate your velum at diverse
points beyond IPA encoding, from a simple "k" (Gielgud's "Leave not a rack behind")
via a romantic, Hispanic 'YO (as in mujer), to the depths of a fatal, Xhosa, heavy-smok-
er's phlegm-throwing graillon (as in the Scousef"*k off). Generally speaking, though,
the word is rhymed with "refuge" rather than with "fudge." In spite of this, the pre-
ferred spelling must remain "kludge." As Terry Lambert explains: 13 " ••• this allows easy
distinction between people who know what they are talking about and people pretend-
ing to know what they are talking about." Compare sQL.

12. John A. Barry, Technobabble (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), pp 145-149, pro-
vides an excellent summary.
13. Devil's Advocate, UNIX Review. March 1991. Further kludging can be found in ibid
November 1990 and January 1991; Doug Parr of Cubix Corporation, Carson City, Nevada, has
sent me the earliest written kluge citation so far: a story published in 1961 in the Life Treasury of
American Folklore (New York: Time Inc.). It tells of Murgalroyd, a newly-enlisted sailor who
gives his civilian occupation as "kluge maker." None of Murgalroyd's superiors is willing to
appear ignorant by asking what a kluge is. Our hero enjoys a quiet service life until eventually a
captain insists that a kluge be made for the admiral's inspection. Murgalroyd employs delaying
tactics by ordering a long list of tools and material. Finally the kluge, the "damnedst-looking thing
you ever saw-wires and springs sticking out in every direction," is presented to the admiral. The
admiral, too, cannot appear ignorant, so he says "It looks like a perfect kluge ... let's see it work."
A nervous, on-the-spot Murgalroyd drops the object overboard as the admiral, captain and crew
watch in suspense. As it sinks into the ocean, it goes "kkluuge."
Well, now, how far does this citation help us pin down the origin of the computer
klugelkludge? In the Murgalroyd story, almost any onomatopoetic term would work. Indeed, the
Life editors report similar tales: Davy Crockett's blacksmith who made a "skow" and Abraham
Lincoln's story of the "fizzle." Joseph M. Perret of La Crescenta, Calif., has been exploring the

108
 kummerbund, Irish

knerd n. A NERD with a Stanford degree.

knowledge-based adj. Rare (Of a program) gnostically generated as
opposed to the bulk of software that is based entirely on hearsay, anecdote,
and superstition. See also KBMT; ZERO-KNOWLEDGE.
Knuth, Don Rockne (1928-) Legendary sports coach turned computer sci-
entist.
=>From a recent interview in Sports WEB Annotated:

SWA: Are you pleased with progress so far?

DRK: Well Stan, we have some real coding talent on the team; if we can stay healthy,
1 think we'll do what we have to do ... we're still just taking it one line at a time ...

KSAM file n. [Acronym for Key Sequential Access Method.] A place where
only key items get lost. Compare ISAM.
Kuhn Blue Book [Named for Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-), American
philosopher and historian of science.] The definitive guide for those buying,
selling and trading PARADIGMS.
=>However, don't expect much of a trade-in on your old paradigm: "I hope you won't
take offense, Sir, but, really ... O dear me ... we haven't seen one of those in
years ... Have you tried the Smithsonian?"

kummerbund, Irish n. The two-inch band of Jockey shorts that shows

above your trouser belt. See also ETHNOLOGY.

oral traditions, and sends me a fascinating letter from his uncle, Joseph A. Perret who worked on
the Univac I in the early 50s. Joseph A. writes: "Kluge as it was spelled then, was a familiar term
to me; and I can date it back to the mid SOs... the term in those days, however, was not used in
the context of software, but was always used in connection with hardware." He then gives some
examples. A typical "kluge" was a single-purpose box designed ''to interface two incompatible
computer systems." In particular, when First National Bank of Boston needed to exchange data
between a Honeywell 3" wide metal tape (sic!) and a 112" ffiM mylar tape, "Ben Taunton, their
computer specialist told me that they were thinking of 'kluging it' .... "
lbe search continues. Note that words do not demand an apodictic etymology. lbey can arise
through playfulness, both drunk and sober. Recall Shakespeare's deflation of the scholar seeking
the origin of "Hey nonny": Bill the Quill effectively says, '''Tis a device to call fools into the
Ring."

109
L
label n. & v. trans. 1 n. Programming An arbitrary but often mnemonic string
assigned to a line in a program to which subsequent GOTO or preceding COME
FROM instructions can be referenced. Labels are mainly used to distinguish the
various ENDLESS LOOPS in a program. 2 n. Magnetic media A physical identi-
fication up front, showing author, date, content, author's bio and previous con-
victions, number of undetected errors, proprietary caveats, waivers re conse-
quential damage, and the address of the nearest attorney. Cautious users have
the foregoing both dymo'd and digitally encoded on the leader of the medi-
um. 3 v. trans. To invoke the message "duplicate label" until a unique label
has been assigned (to a program line or statement).
=>Current lawyer-aware marketing brings forth the idiot-proof, catch-all warning
label. Thus, a formerly harmless keyboard must carry the caveats: "00 not type non-
stop with extended wrists for more than 48 hours (see diagram 3, p. 48). Further, on
no account must you prise off the Escape keytop and insert it in your ear, nose, mouth
or rectum, or the ear, nose, mouth or rectum of your friends, enemies or pets without
their express written consent (see diagram 8, p. 69) ... " Warnings about the contents of
food and drinks have reached a Zen nadir: the Hakutsuru Sake bottle declares
"Contains sulfites not detected;' the software equivalent of "QA has not yet found the
bugs, but we're sure they're lurking about somewhere."

labor-hour n. See PERSON-HOUR.

lambda calculus n. 1 Lamed calculus for the goyim. 2 The one true model
Church of Computability (Alonzo Church: 'The calculi of lambda-conver-
sion," Annals of Math. Studies 6, Princeton). See also SCHOENFINKEL.

lambada calculus n. [Inspired by Matthew Rabuzzi, 1992] A set of algo-

rithms to determine the maximum number of dancing angels per pinhead.
=>"Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about
the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests
between fundamentally differing concepts" (J. Backus, ACM Thring Lecture, 1977).

lambdacism n. \pronouced rambdacism.\ Excessive use of the LAMBDA CAL-

CULUS.

laptop adj. Also called lappable. Marketing (Of a computer) weighing less
than 80 Ibs.
=>In fact, recent lappability STUDIES have shown that most users can survive four hours
with a IOO-lb computer on their knees before terminal thrombo-phlebitis sets in.
Laptop manufacturers are cooperating by ensuring that battery life is limited to three
hours.

110
 I••

Last Action Hero n. The QA manager who stamped "Ready to ship" on

Microsoft WINDOWS 1.0.
~Popular variants indict Sun's Solaris 2.0 and the Titanic.

latch-lifter n. [Scouse (Liverpool) argot] 1 The price of admission, leading

to the possibility of free rounds. 2 The HACKER effort expended to gain initial
access to a site.
~The Stoic ethics of Merseyside pub crawling demands that you pay for your first
bevvy (drink), figuratively "lifting the latch" and gaining a valued place at the bar as a
bona-fide customer. Thereafter, endless ploys are available to sponge from friend and
stranger. Thus, you may challenge all upstanding (if any) to name the last man to box
Gentleman Jim (the undertaker); seek the dead center of town (Anfield Cemetery); or
ask who played for both Liverpool and Evenon at the same derby soccer match (the
Royal Marines Band). Additionally, there are many bets you can place on factual
(name the referee and linesmen at the 1913 FA Cup Final) or Smullyan-type (is A
telling the truth about what B is saying about Pascal?) trivia.

latest version n. See VERSION, LATEST.

law n. 1 (usually capitalized as The Law) Antonym for both '1ustice" and
"mercy." 2 Any statement in the aphoristic environment, coined to amuse and
distract regardless of apodictic truth or empirical verifiability.
~Some meta-laws escape the latter qualifications, e.g.,

Kelly's pith-poor Law: "Terseness is not enough."

G.B. Shaw's goLden ruLe: 'There are no golden rules."
Following a spate of undisciplined lawmaking, ANSI established the Solon Committee
in 1978 to devise guidelines for the fonnulation of laws and their preferred typography
in two major categories:

The standard ANSI 1.75-inch diameter lapel button.

The standard ANSI 11.25-inch car bumper sticker.
The rival Hammurapi Committee, set up by ISO in 1979, has accepted the latter stan-
dard, subject to some minor revisions, but utterly rejects the antiquated ANSI button
size as an unjustified curb on creativity. The ISO 5. 139-cm-diameter button will prob-
ably prevail, in spite of the earnest 1.845-inch compromise proposal from the United
Kingdom representative.

SEE FOLLOWING ENTRIES·

Decompiling, James Joyce's law of

Gershwin's law

Grosch's law

111
lexicon

Grosch's law, corollary to

Murphy's law of programming

Voltaire-Candide, law of

Welfare, Burns'law of

• A database of tarnished troisms initiated by Conrad Scheiker is being maintained at the

Computer Center, University of Arizona, Thcson, Arizona, 85721 by Gregg Townsend.

laxlcon n. THIS dictionary.

layering n. The creation of impassable FlREWALLS between arbitrary levels of

a PROTOCOL.
leader n. 1 (Of a project) the person at the front, followed blindly until the
break occurs. 2 (Of a magnetic or paper tape) the piece at the front. followed
blindly until the break occurs. 3 (Of a punched-card deck) the veteran. battle-
hardened card placed at the front of the pack to soften the defensive jaws of
the opposing card reader. Compare TRAILER.
~ As me an' me marrer was reading' a tyape,
The tyape gave a shriek mark an' tried tae escyape;
It skipped ower the gyate tae the end of the field,
An' jigged oot the room wi' a spool an' a reel!
Follow the leader, Johnny me laddie,
Follow it through, me canny lad 0;
Follow the transport. Johny me laddie,
Away, lad, lie away, canny lad O!
(Industrial Ballad, Durham, N.E. England)

leading n. \pronounced ledding.\ Archaism A line-space unit formerly allo-

cated intuitively by inserting strips of real. metallic lead between lines of real.
metallic font. The DTP (Desktop Publishing) equivalent. taking Word Perfect
for Windows 5.2 as an example, will drive you insane. The Reference Manual
index points to "Leading. adjustment-page 574." "Leading. initial setting-
page 636," and "Leading see Whitespace-page 283." Pages 574 and 283 do
not contain the string "leading:' while page 636 says "Line Height (Leading)
=
Adjustment between Lines 0 inches; between Paragraphs =
0 inches:' If you
have survived this run-around. you may decide to consult the twenty-one
index entries under "Line Height." One of them refers to page 574 (deja vu);
here the para headed "Line Height Adjustment" ends with the helpful. "For
further information, see Line Height Adjustment in Reference."

leadlng-edge adj. 1 (Of a technology) a few microns blunter than STATE-QP-

TIlE-ART. 2 (Of a tab-card feeding option) two of the eight possibilities.

112
Whenever practical, tab cards should be submitted to the card reader so that
the least significant columns are chewed up first.
learning curve n. The plotting of K, knowledge-gained (y-axis), against t,
time-expended (x-axis).
~The possibly fractal results indicate how you might master or forget a subject as
time goes by. In spite of well-established graphing conventions for dK/dt, the rate of
knowledge acquisition, the DP literature often bemoans, rather than celebrates, a
"steep learning curve." A happier trend is emerging whereby the learning curve is char-
acterized as "easy," "gentle," "short," or "difficult" without explicitly specifying the
gradient. However, a new confusion has appeared: "Without a proven solution, you
risk absorbing startup costs in your first project. To avoid such problems, you need to
travel the learning curve quickly" (Alsys real-time Ada development brochure). Here
we seem to be violating all the known (so far) laws of physics by trying to dash along
the learning curve in better than real time. In fact, there is no absolute learning curve
that each of us must navigate. For any given target system and individual exposed
thereto, there is no shortage of soft scientists who will plot, plot, plot to produce learn-
ing curves for various didactic methodologies (they get paid by the syllabus and by the
syllable). Whether such curves are relevant to other learners is extremely moot. Adjust
the curve if you can, but the x-axis represents 01' Man riverrun Time, who jest keep
rollin' along. A fruitful extension is to consider the learning curve as hysteresial: from
t = 0, our K builds up with monotonously malleable monotonicity. Soon dK/dt tails off
to zero as we ask "Who needs all this? Will it butter my parsnips?" and K peaks with
boredom and/or saturation. At the drop of a cusp, K suddenly starts declining as we
find better ways to spend our x-axis. The curve, alas, does not return to zero: retentiv-
ity ensures that we'll remember unto death some stupid, irrelevant subset of K (typi-
cally that Shift+F7 stores and prints the current message).

lebensRAM n. The QUI conspiracy presaged in Adolf Hitler's Me;n Kampf.

"4 MB is my final demand."
legacy adj. 1 (Of software) mature, reliable, unfashionable. 2 (Of hardware)
soldiering on; desperately seeking spare parts. See also MAINFRAME; PASTEMIC.
~I first encountered the adjective "legacy," in a KnowledgeWare leaflet describing the
mind-reeling, reel-winding mounds of ancient, unportable, pastemic code that survive
throughout our fair planet in installations large and small. I pictured the unveiling of
the old Coboller's Last Will & Testament. The lawyer reads to the acquisitive and
mutually jealous next-of-kin. They grow edgy during the long preamble: "Little did I
envisage when I wrote my first divide subroutine ... and how we longed for Knuth's
next volume .... " Who'll get the collectible collator? She always promised me the
embalmed bug. 0 Lord, the bugger's left me the payroll suite on 30,000 soggy cards!
The lucky, but rare, legatees are those who have not changed their differential equa-
tions or bookkeeping methods since the first Univacs or 1401s were painfully pro-
grammed thirty years or more ago. "We ain't never goin' through all that again," they

113
LEGOL

swore as the years rolled by with ever-increasing bpb (bangs per buck) vitiated by
ever-loftier, less efficient languages. IPS (instructions per second) moved up via KIPS
to and beyond MIPS as they switched to 140I-emulating 3608, 360-emulating
Honeywells, and, for all I know, Honeywell-emulating SparcStations. But the good old
reliable legacy code hangs in there, or rather, refuses to hang!

LEGOL n. A high-level billable language embodying the wisdom and preci-

sion accrued over 300,000 lawyer-years of patient litigation during March
1994 in California. More at legalese, TNHD.
~Let a simple example suffice: the C statement
int i = 1;
translates to LEGOL as
Be It Understood And Acknowledged By These Presents That
the newly created object is herewith to be named and referred to as "i" within the scope
determined by the preferred embodiment of the previously submitted namespace
patent hereby incorporated by reference and further that "i" being of the type declared
known and widely recognized as integer it shall straightway without let or hindrance
be assigned and allotted ne quid nimis the value I (ONE) and shall retain that value
sub tegmine fagi until such time or times if any that some other value within the juris-
diction of the Type Safety (Promotions) Act may be assigned and a1loted thereto.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned assignment the said value of "i" shall be subject
to male parta male dilabuntur and all liability due to mal de chip or mal de code is
expressly excluded.
LEGOL also allows a variant of the #include directive:

lemma three n. More strictly, a conjecture; even more strictly, a possible

conjecture, insofar as Pierre de Fermat's dying marginalia in 1665 read: "Ab,
pauv' cons, you zink zat my penultimate conjecteure was incroyable... mais, et
c'est un grand mais .. .it is but un cas special of my jolie troisieme lemmere,
qu'on voit danser Ie long des golfes clairs... Mon dieu, I have a precise upper
bound for the Selmer group in the semistable case of the symmetric square
representation associated to a modular form... Mi par di veder un gran
lume... Gaston, de l'encre et encore one autre marge!. ..arrgh!" The search
continues.
=* CHORUS Lemma three, very pretty, and the converse pretty too;
But only God and Fermat know which of them is true.
VERSE I When I studied number theory, I was happy in me prime,
And all them wild conjectures, I knocked them two at a time, but...

114
 IexlcalllCOp8

CHORUS

VERSE 2 Last week, at supervision, Ken Ribet said to me:

"Did you discover the deliberate mistake in lemma number three?"

CHORUS

VERSE 3 Lemma three it has puzzled mathematicians by the score,

But Max Newman has engulfed it, and it won't be seen no more.

CHORUS

VERSE 4 Well, the axiom of choice, it is very clear to me:

If you wanna choose a lemma, boys, then don't choose lemma three,
for ...

CHORUS

VERSE 5 And it's black and white together, we shall not be moved,
But the four-color theorem, it hasn't yet been proved," (last time
now ... )

CHORUS Lemma three, very pretty, and the converse pretty too;
But only God and Andrew know which of them is true.

(Words by SK-B, based with deep respect on ''The Lemon Tree," Will Holt, Dolfi
Music Inc., Chappell Music Company, New York.)

less than \pronounced <.\ A symbol of inequality and victimization having

precedence over all other symbols of disparity.
:::)The less than symbol is located betwen such pairs of variables as: (C, C++};
(YourDoxy, MyDoxy}, (YOURGOL, MYGOL}, and (MyPay, MyWorth}.

lexical scope n. One of natural language's many risible barriers to disam-

biguation. See also HYPHEN.

:::)Thus, the Small Computer Book Club promises to "Hone your small computer
skills," to which we say, "With insults like this, the Club is likely to remain small." In
other parts of the literature, we read of "hard disk problems" and "Real-Time
Marketing Managers." In the absence of scoping indications, we could have "Real-
Time (Marketing Managers)" or "(Real-Time Marketing) Managers." We are left to
ponder whether they solve "quickly enough" each marketing problem as it comes
along, or whether they tackle reaI-time-marketing problems in their own time. We need
to be told.

14. If you have read, understood, and LINTed Appel & Hak"'R'S program, you can skip this pre-
1976 verse.

115
LF

along, or whether they tackle real-time-marketing problems in their own time. We need
to be told.
Paul A. Wax reports a paper called "Eating Disordered Women in the Workplace,"
by Susan Gale Hanchey, Ph.D., and notes that "Dr Hanchey never takes a position for
or against this practice, I'm sorry to say."

LF n. 1 (1929) Handout. 2 (1970) ASCII Line Feed. See also CR.

~ "I do love my boss, he's a great pal of mine;

"And that's why I'm standing in this here bread line;
"Hallelujah, I'm a bum, hallelujah, bum again;
"Hallelujah, give us a handout to revive us again."
(Anon. Wobbly Hymn)

liberation n. [Latin Liber "a deity associated with the Greek Bacchus."] A
specialized, heady form of emulation, allowing the user to switch rapidly from
one manufacturer (usually IBM) to another (usually HoneyweIl) during an
orgiastic "half-price-but-hurry" period known as the "happy hour."
LIFO adj. [Acronym for Last In, First Out.] 1 (Of a STACK) being analogous
to the central deck of cards in gin rummy, where (pace card sharping) cards
are taken from or placed on the top position only. As with gin rummy, the top
item in the stack has usually been discarded by someone else and is not the
item you are seeking. Compare FIFO; LlNO. 2 (Of industrial relations) related
to a commonly observed situation where the most recently employed are the
first to strike.
linear adj. Evenly proportioned; scalable; soluble; predictable; unrealistic.
Compare SEGMENTED.
linear programming n. Also called LP. A tidy method of programming in
which the horizontal strings of source code are kept strictly parallel and right-
hand justified, while all indentions are set to offer a pleasing trompe I' oeil ver-
tical aspect. Borrowing the traditional engineering design axiom, some say "If
the program looks good, it's probably correct."
~Early, random tests by DPM proctors, aimed at eradicating insobriety and nonlin-
earity among programmers, included such odious practices as FORTRAN smear tests,
SNOBOL uroscopies, and extended BASIC breathalyzers. The request to "blow into this
bag" was often unsuccessfully countered by the rejoinder, "Why? Are your chips too
hot?" The IUP (International Union of Programmers) has now negotiated a more
humane regimen, whereby the proctor must have reasonable doubts regarding the state
of the suspect programmer before demanding two simple, physical tasks: first, the pro-
grammer must circumnavigate a prescribed flowchart or class hierarchy without
throwing up; second, the programmer must thrice intone, without undue sibilation,
"The LISP parenthesis doth perennially pisseth us off."

116
 10C8le

UNO Last In Never Out. A stack uncertain whether Pascal or C argument

conventions prevail.
lint n. & v. More correctly de-lint [Cotton trade: lint "nasty bits of waste yarn
causing 'trouble at'MILL."'] (Chiefly UNIXand c) 1n. A doryphoric (nit-comb-
ing) filter program claiming to report those inevitable syntactic, semantic, and
stylistic errors that are presumably undetectable by any compilerninker. 2 v.
To subject or expose (source code) to the lint program. See also OORYPHORE.
Compare HAIR.More at TNHD.
=>The lint.c source itself, of course, should be linted relintlessly. The homely
Liverpudlian analog is a nested (i.e., infested) array of biddy-combs, each capable of
cleaning its successor, nay, unto the root.

Liquid Papere The Gillette Company, Stationery Products Division.

Supplied with all Frisian word processors for on-screen corrections. See also
ETHNOLOGY.

LISP n. Preferred plural, at least for Francophones: LISPen. 1 LISt

Processing language, J. McCarthy (MIT, late 1950s), but often mistaken as
acronym for Lots of Irritating Spurious (or Superfluous) Parentheses. I' More
at TNHO.See also LOGOMACHY.
2 Laser Impulse Space Propulsion, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1993.
=>Which of the two LISPen will survive this millennium remains to be seen. The rock-
et system may turn out to be in loco parens, destined to discover some distant,
advanced galaxy where dedicated LISP-the-Ianguage machines are built and sold prof-
itably.

list n. The sinking feeling induced by excessive documentation.

local adj. [Spanish loco "foolish, mad, irresponsible."] 1(Of a site, terminal,
node, branch, user, agent, object) being, rightly, kept in ignorance of the poli-
cies, strategies, and protocols devised, and daily refined, by some centralized
pool of superior intelligence. 2 (Of a variable) confined; stunted; unable to
spread its erroneous wings, and doomed to flap forever in some obscure,
somber, scope-ridden block. 3 (Of an error) latent; malignant; lurkful; ticking
away. 4 (Of a pub) the nearest and dearest, providing minimal LATCHLIFI'ERS,
a tabula rasable credit slate, and an armory of personalized "arrers" (darts).
Compare GLOBAL.
locale n. An ANSI-approved ethnic stereotype.

15. For the definitive, picaresque tale see Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel, "The
Evolution of LISP," ACM SIGPLAN, HOPL·ll Conference Proceedings 28, no. 3.

II?
logical diagram

logical diagram n. The graphical idealization of a circuit, indicating by

means of lines, arrows, and symbols the various conflicting choices facing any
electron rash enough to venture therein.

logomachy n. 11960s The good-humored altercations between supporters

of EV-LISP and of EVQ-LISP. 2 1980s The good-humored altercations
between members of the Common LISP committee. See note 15.
~As John McCarthy once said, "It doesn't really matter which language you choose;
they're both very good."

look'n'teel n. [Look and feel] The ill-defined, superficial but legally pro-
tectable property of a user interface, esp. where the underlying application has
been stolen from others.

loop n. & v. intrans. [From Middle English loupe "a noose, a circle of rope
used in applied knot theory to enforce suspended judgments; a device similar
to the one recommended by Polonius for garroting one's friends."] 1 n.
Programming The frantic rehearsal of a certain sequence of program steps
until the system "gets it right," failing which the loop is branded endless; the
repetition of a certain sequence of program steps WHILE, and only while, a
set of unforeseen circumstances prevails; an algorithmic recycling; a piece of
code in search of a LOOPHOLE. 2 n. Control theory Also called feed-back loop.
The amplification and regurgitation of error signals in order to achieve any
desired degree of instability. 3 v. intrans. Programming To relinquish com-
mand for an unspecified period, as: "D'you mind taking over the console, I'm
looping for a while." See also DYNAMIC HALT; ENDLESS LOOP.

loop, endless n. See ENDLESS LOOP.

loophole n. 1The escape route sought by a LOOP. 2 Metacomputer science

The conceptual gap left when a loop migrates to another part of the metasys-
tern. Any fresh loop nearby will be attracted into the hole, and so on. 3
Marketing A deficiency in the jurisprudential environment that allows over-
selling on the grounds of diminished responsibility, knowledge, and honesty.

Lord High Fixer n. For any given installation, the oldest living member of
the original programming team. See also GURU.
~Unfortunately, the Lord High Fixer, when needed, will be found to have moved to a
distant, competitive site or to have set up as an independent consultant.

Lotus n. A sleep-inducing corporation claiming ownership of the sequence 1-

2-3, and hence, via Peano's axioms, threatening dominion over Z+ the set of
natural numbers. See also PATENT.

118
 LP

=>The Lotus 1-2-3 trademark may clash with my prior claim over all subsets in the
decimal expansion of n. Are the courts number-theoretically ready to try such cases?
Borland, paradoxically, has the upper hand, since they now control (figuratively)
the zero spreadsheet. Lotus may well rue the day they did not follow the C option-base
convention: Lotus 0-1-2.

low-level language n. 1 A primitive programming language in which each

line of code needs, but never gets, 20 lines of comment. 2 Also called common
language. Imprecatory, often scatological strings aimed at an ailing system.
=>If delivered with sufficiently high DENIER, genuinely anthropomorphic venom, and
heavy, reed-bending keyboard ostinato, such inputs have been known to shame the
operating system into a belated response. The system's own obscure introspections
will be suspended briefly while a conciliatory message is flashed to the user. Compare
HIGH-LEVEL LANGUAGE.

low memory adj. (Of a GUI system) having 4 MB RAM. Systems with less
than 4 MB are now called "no memory systems."

low-self-esteem books n. Also called books for the balDed. Any book
riding on the huge success of DOS for Dummies (Dan Gookin, lOG Books,
San Mateo, Calif.).
=>My contest for rival titles (UNIX Review, October 1993) invoked: Visual BASIC for
the Blind; MIDI for the Deaf; Pacsal for the Dyxlesic; REXX for Ex-Monarchs; C++
for the Nonplussed; dBASE for the Debased; Quicken for the Dead; 1-2-3 for the
Innumerate; CLU for the Clueless; and LISP for the Listless. In spite of this ridicule,
the genre has grown to include The Complete Idiot's Guide to Brain Surgery.

LP n. [Gramophonic abbrev.: Long Playing-sometimes confused, under-

standably, with the abbreviation for LINEAR PROGRAMMING.] The recording of
Paul Erdos's recitation of e to 80,000 places, available in Hungarian, German,
Russian, Hebrew, and English. The rare, collectible 1972 edition has a small
error in the 34,034th digit. See also DIGITAL RECORDING; OVERLOADING.
=>In the audio-reproductive vinyllic environment, we have progressed leisurely from
78 rpm via 45 rpm (misnamed EP for Extended Play in view of the reduced diameter)
to 33 1/3 rpm (LP) formats with severe but correctable discontinuities in locational
central-hole-size methodologies. Terminologists were presumably ready with ELP
(Extended Long Play) or perhaps SP (Super Play) if the 16 2/3 rpm record had
appeared, but the digital magic of the CD (Compact Disc) arrived to upturn-tables on
the analog-scratch of groove-grinding needles. Offsetting the claimed loss of ambience
and the joys of hand-sharpening bamboo styli, one must acknowledge that Solti's CD
Decca Ring cycle now occupies 85 percent less shelf space (5.75" x 6" x 5" CD ver-
sus 7" x 13" x 13" LP).

119
Luddite

Luddite n. [Origin: from "King" Ned Ludd, legendary victim of enforced

automation during the Industrial Revolution, Yorkshire, England (ca. 1780).]
One who, Canute-like, attempts to stem the tide of computerization. Having
failed by stapling checks, folding tabcards, defacing OCR documents, demag-
netizing credit cards, and part-paying utility and telephone accounts, the
diehard Luddite resolves to continue the struggle from within by becoming an
undercover programmer.
~Ironically, most Luddite programmers quickly achieve DPM status, which denies
them both the inclination and the opportunity to sabotage:

The Luddite class can kiss my ass,

I've got the foreman's job at last.16

The DP counter-counterrevolution, though, must not become complacent. Three-shift

vigilance should be the battle cry. Spotting the traitor coder in your midst is not easy-
only the most naive Luddite will punch the giveaway X in column 5-since, nowadays,
all programmers have the shifty, rebellious aspect of a communard freshly scraped off
a disputed barricade, or the truculent sneer of one who has marched ten thousand miles
with Mao to get to work. Similarly, the abnormality of program error distribution pre-
cludes any positive discrimination between deliberate and standard coding blunders.
Some overzealous vigilante groups still string up a suspect programmer at the drop
of a semicolon, and although several studies show this to be a cost-effective method of
improving program quality (e.g., Bonus Payments or Lynching?: A Comparative
Study-Judge Thumphreys, Journal of the Institute for Software Productivity and
Discipline 9, no. 3 [1979]), too many bright Luddites evade justice. Emerging as the
least fallible indicator of the non-wasp in your system's bosom is the "punctuality
test." Programmers consistently arriving on-site at the preordained time are doubly
suspect. Why are they so anxious to "get at" the system? And how did they avoid the
general state of abulia and debility induced in all genuine programmers by the previ-
ous session? Is there a time bomb ticking away in your cherished database? Your punc-
tual, hard-working, over-reliable apostates, they know, they know! Do not hang or fire
them! Promote them quickly, the higher, the better!

16. Compare with Leon Rosselson's anti-Labour Party parody, "We'll sing the Red Rag once a
year."

120
M
M prefix [Mega-] Either 1()()()2 or 220 depending upon the financial implica-
tions. Compare K. More at TNHO at quantifiers.
~Sadly, in natural discourse. mega has become a vapid. ho-hum amplifier lurking
fuzzily within the shifting showbiz range of superdooper to hyperdyper. Once you
have tagged your best-selling trend as mega. your rivals will scoff "If that's all there
is. then let's keep dancing ....•• From the "merely mega." they'lI trot out the whole SI
(Systeme International) sequence: giga. tera,peta. exa •...
"Some said exa. I said 'More Yet';
"Some said loelta. and it's 'More Yet';
"Some said yolta. I said 'More Yet';
"The name of this song is 'More Yet""
(adapted from Leadbelly. "More Yet")

Mac, MAC n. [Gaelic: son of. whence patronymic prefixes, Mac and Me; the
young of any animal; a term of endearment; anonymous person, what's-yer-
name (cf. French machin).]
~Relating these simple origins to the current MacOverload is a tempting but fruitless
(and possibly actionable) exercise. The litigious claims over this ancient prefix in the
audio, computer. and hamburger environments have apparently led to the withdrawal
of the Scottish Play (Shakespeare's Macbeth) from the theatrical repertoire.

1 [Abbrev. via the McDonald's fast-food chain to its eponymous products] The
universal, uniformly distributed, triadic meal, variously relished. Its remark-
able impact on the world's cuisinary sensibilities extends to "Ies arrondisse-
ments les plus chic de Paris," where "Ie Big Mac" has revived a million jaded
palates.
2 [Abbrev. Apple Macintosh; also called (derog.) Madntoy, Macintrasb.] A
popular OUI PC invented at Xerox Park, built in Malaysia, and reputedly mar-
keted from Cupertino.
~One of the profoundest mysteries of the PC jungle is why the freedom-loving. pe0-
ple-empowering Apple Macintosh acquired a fiercely protected. over-priced. closed
architecture. while ffiM. the nasty. grasping, brainwashing, Wall-Street-suited Jackals,
opened up their box to friendly. affordable clonage throughout the four comers of
Taiwan.
3 [Acronyms for Machine-aided Cognition; Multiple Access Computer; Man
Against Computers; Maniacs And Clowns.] The U.S. government-funded
MIT Project MAC (1963) that helped spawn the HACKER culture now. ironi-
cally, under expensive Federal attack.

121
macaroon

4 [Acronyms for Multiplexed Analog Components; Message Authentication

Code; Military Airlift Command; Model Airplane Club; Maximum Allowed
Concentration. ]
=>As they say in disambiguating circles, the meaning of MAClMac is "usually clear
from the context."

macaroon n. A half-caste employed by Apple Computer Inc.

machine-Independent adj. Being or pertaining to a software or hardware
element which will not work on any computer. Compare PORTABLE; VENDOR-
INDEPENDENT.

machine-readable also (colloq.) machinable. adj. (Of a text) encoded and

saved, usually on a magnetic medium or CD-ROM.
=>In theory, a stored text can be restored at any time to its original human-enjoyable
form. In REAL LtFE, however, insuperable barriers intervene, such as printer drivers,
font managers, and forgotten file names.

macro n. & adj 1 n. \pronounced maquereau.\ A pimp selling pirated copies

of Quattro on the rue St Denis. 2 adj. (Of an assembler) mollycoddling.

macrocephalic adj. (Of a SPREADSHEET user) smart enough to avoid real

programming.

MAFIA n. [Acronym for Mechanized Applications in Forced Insurance

Accounting.] An extensive network with many on-line and offshore subsys-
tems running under OS, DOS, and 10S.
=>MAFIA documentation is rather scanty, and the MAFIA sales office exhibits that
testy reluctance to respond to bona fide inquiries which is the hallmark of so many DP
organizations. From the little that has seeped out, it would appear that MAFIA oper-
ates under a nonstandard protocol, OMERTA, a tight-lipped variant of SNA, in which
extended handshakes also perform complex security functions. The known timeshar-
ing aspects of MAFIA point to a more than usually autocratic operating system. Screen
prompts carry an imperative, nonrefusable weighting (most menus offer simple
YES/YES options, defaulting to YES) that precludes indifference or delay. Uniquely,
all editing under MAFIA is performed centrally, using a powerful mbout feature capa-
ble of erasing files, filors, filees, and entire nodal aggravations.

mainframe n. & adj. 1 n. Hardware (Chiefly disparaging & offensive) the

much-abused room-sized computer that ruled the OP roost until the "mini-is-
bigger" craze of the 1970s and the "micro-is-even-bigger" excesses of the
I980s. 2 adj. Software (Chiefly complimentary as in "mainframe-quality")
tried and trusted, solid and reliable. See also CLIENT-SERVER; DOWNSIZING;
GROSCH'S LAW; ffiM; LEGACY; MICROPROCESSOR; PASTEMIC; SUPERCOMPUTER.

122
 major new-Ievel re•••••

~The familiar graphs of available Kbytes per tonne, MIPS per cubic-yard, and Horn
clauses per yen, plotted against the last five decades' frantic abscissa, seem to have
sealed the mainframe's fate. Even with a logarithmic ordinate, these graphs are almost-
everywhere damnably near vertical. However, defying the economists' obituaries, Big
Iron refuses to Rust In Peace. The MIS mindset, by definition, dreams of empires based
on the single, tangible, controllable, high-budget DP epicenter. The unthinkable alter-
native is PC anarchy: distant, computer-illiterate branches rushing to purchase, this
week only, multimedia XTs pre-loaded with CP/M and WordStar 1.0 from a mail-order
catalog, not to mention enterprise data distributed god-knows-where on 5-cent flop-
pies. Thus, the MIPS graph can be exponentially discounted on the grounds that not all
instructions are equal.
Alas, the traditional big-iron suppliers are unable to cope with the escalating
demand for solid, reliable mainframes. Daily, it seems, we read of attempted raids on
the Boston and other Computer Museums. In spite of redoubled security, the entire
Boston Whirlwind exhibit was stolen on March 3, 1994, and is now rumored to be run-
ning, sub umbra but with great success, the seat-reservation system for a major airline.
Equally disturbing is the report that Scotland Yard is investigating the disappearance
of the Babbage Analytical Engine from the South Kensington Science Museum. The
trail, so far, grows cold at the North Korean border.
Beware, then, of the rag-and-bone street criers trying to buy your legacy hardware
on the cheap:

"Any old iron, any old iron,

"Any any any old iron;
"You look neat, talk about a treat,
"You look dapper from your napper to yer feet;
"Dressed in style, brand new files,
"With yer father's old green tie on;
"I wouldn't give yer tuppence for yer EDSAC I,
"Old iron, old iron!"
(Cockney music-hall song)

maintenance n. The replacement of one set of error states by another.

~Ideally, the latter should be nonintersecting with, and more catastrophic than, the
former. In routine maintenance the replacement is applied on a regular basis, so that
DOWNTIME increases in an orderly, controlled, monotonic sequence. The system grace-
fully converges to a state of OBSOLESCENCE on a date convenient for the marketing
department.

major new-level release n. 1Marketing Any RELEASE. 2 Programming The

next release. 3 Level A 128/12.456/K 17C, replacing level A 128/12.456/K 17B.
4 A complete recasting of the systems software rendering all previous pro-
grams inoperative. 5 c++ Changing the access specifier of a single
iostream data member from private to protected. 6 Microsoft Any
set of bug-fixes costing the user more than $39.95.

123
Malloc, malloc

Malloc, malloc n. & v. trans. 1 n. Canaanite deity controlling memory allo-

cations. 2 v. trans. C/C++ library To request space on the heap.
~The call ip = (int *)malloe (N*sizeof (int» ; will try to allocate and
initialize enough dynamic memory on the heap for N integers. If successful, a valid,
non-null pointer is returned in ip pointing to this allocation. Failure for any reason,
usually insufficient memory, is signaled by a null (0) value in ip. A long-running the-
ological contention has been how C should handle malloe (0), the call for no allo-
cation. My draconian solution is that a ''Too much memory available" warning should
be displayed, followed by the complete erasure of the offending program.

man-hour n. A sexist, obsolete measure of macho effort, equal to 60

kiplings. See also IF; PC.
~One man-hour can represent one man working for one hour, two men quibbling for
thirty minutes, or a billion men pussyfooting for a nanosecond. Most areas of OP activ-
ity now include a synergistic mix of male and female operatives, and the man-hour unit
is being replaced by the PERSON-HOUR, using a conversion factor of 1.50.

MANIAC n. 1 An early computer built at the Institute of Advanced Studies,

Princeton (fl. 1952). 2 "Anyone who has been making or using a digital com-
puter for more than a few years" (Lord Bowen, Faster than Thought, 1953).

-mancy suffix [Greek manteia, "divination."] Indicative of an unsound fore-

casting method. See BITOMANCY; ONOMANCY; RETROMANCY; SCATOMANCY.

~The one exception is margaritomancy: The dedicated analysis of random com-

pounds of tequila, lemon, and salt has never failed to transmute present uncertainties
into pleasant predictions.

manufacturer n. also (rare) suppUer. A loosely knit and constantly chang-

ing group referred to as "we" in proposals and "you" in legal actions.
~More abstractly, the manufacturer is the second of the SEVEN CATASTROPHES OF COM-
PUTING. See also OEM; PRODUCTIZATION.

map n. & v. trans. 1 n. The imponderable correspondence between two sets,

one of which (the domain) is unknown, while the other (the range) is unknow-
able. 2 v. trans. To establish, or to imagine the establishment of, some rela-
tionship between two incongruent sets, e.g., (disk sectors) and (records),
(records) and (fields), (fields) and (bits), or (sales territories) and (salesper-
sons).

marketing n. The essential branch of DP, unfazed by grammar, orthography,

and technicalities.

massively parallel adj. 1 Hypergeometry (Of two right lines) nonintersect-

ing and many megaparsecs apart even at the points at infinity. 2 (Of a com-

124
 maturity

puter architecture) employing 2N microprocessors where N depends on Intel's

current discount structure; esp. of a system massively searching for parallel
advances in the programming arts. Compare MASSIVELY SERIAL.
~In particular, the challenge is to divide a problem into a large number of indepen-
dent llIREADS.MONISTSneed not apply.
The choice of vapid, sloganeering amplifiers such as "very large scale," "massive,"
"super," "mega," and "hyper" is, eventually, a barrier to technical progress. The physi-
cists have fallen into the same trap with their GUT (Grand Unification Theory),
Superstrings, and TOE (Theory of Everything). Follow lhal, as they say in ShowBiz.
See a/so HYPER; VLSI.

massively serial adj. 1 Of the author's lot. 2 Relating to the RS-232 and
IEEE-488 specifications. Compare MASSIVELY PARALLEL. See also SERIAL.

m'as-tu-vu \pronounced matoovoo\ n. & adj. [French: "Have you seen

meT] A vain person or entity; a show-off desperately in need of attention
however degrading.
~This bona-fide, albeit a tad slangy, French idiotisme, whether used as a noun or an
adjective, is what c++ would qualify as roost. The fonn is "invariant," resisting the
nonnal inflections for number and gender: un m'as-tu-vu (one show-oft); deux m'as-
lu-vu (two show-oft's); ce qu'elle est m'as-tu-vu! (what a show-off she is!). Exemplars
are, by definition, easy to spot, and the MEDIAover-anxious to oblige. For example, and
not in any particular order, consider Steve Jobs, Jahweh, Adam Osborne, and any last-
minute objector to an ANSI-language standard.

MATISSE n. Also M.A.T.I.S.S.E [n.t ADB Inc., Cambridge, Mass.] Yet

another exploited famous person. See ONOMANCY; NEWTON.
matrix n. (Printing) a set of dots that you can connect with a pencil to reveal
a hidden character.
~In the matrix-for-dummies versions, the dots are numbered.

Matthew 13:58 ("And he did not mighty works there because of their unbe-
lief' [Ruler James Version]). The proof text for many of the failures in DP
MARKETING.

~ Thus, witness the growing MISresistance to claims that the CLIENT-SERVERME1lIOD-

oLOGY-of-the-Month will increase interoperable seamlessness by N percent for any N
>0.

maturity n. The long-awaited state of DP.

~In 1950, we said "Be fair ... give us another ten years." Now, after 40+ years, an age
at which most primates and their offspring are fully developed, we are still waiting. A
clear sign of maturation would be a computer-related radio show with the zany humor
and knowledge of the Click'n'Clack brothers' Car Talk.

125
MAW

MAW n. 1 [Acronym for MICROSOFT At Work.] A set of standards aimed at

crippling all known office machines with embedded Windows NT. 2 The gob·?
or stomach of a voracious animal.
~ We are advised by anonymous lawyers to our immediate north that any connection
between these two definitions is entirely coincidental and crushingly actionable. But.
MAW is already worming its way into diverse office appliances. and past experience
indicates that gullible power users cannot wait to load all their gadgets with 32 MB
RAM and 240 MB disks in the Grail hunt for maximum INTEROPERABILITY. Aping the
widespread "Intel Inside!" and "AMD Outside!" stickers. "MS All Over!" decals will
soon appear on your telephones. copiers, and pencil sharpeners.
Microsoft is not hiding its LEBENSRAM ambitions. There, in the WinAPI, is the
brazen, apocalyptic function:

SetWorldTransform() .

The GatesIMcCaw plan. yet another seamful web. will encircle the Earth with 840 spy
satellites able to spot and zap Solaris 2.x sites just as they become productive (the tim-
ing is sublime). CompuServe is also dead-meat. super-highway roadkill: note that
Teledesic is a blatant anagram of "Delete CIS." QED.
The Biblical foretokens are many and irrefutable:

"And there were Windows11ol in three rows and light was against light in three ranks"
(l Kings 7:4 KJV).

We see this as Microsoft swallowing IBM (note the clear reference to the nested-arrays
of APU2), AT&T. and Digital. reading rows as CaSE-induced disputations, and light
as "lacking weight."

"And I will make thy Windows11ol of agates [sic]. and thy Gates [sic] of carbuncles,
and all thy borders of pleasant stones" (Isaiah 54: 12 KJV).

Here, one is tom between reading "carbuncle" as precious gem or painful blister
(another potential AUTO-ANTONYM. yet both meanings come from the small, red
ember). Either way. there is no disputing the implied usurpation of the X-Window's
jewels and the manipulation of the XStones benchmark.

"Behold. if the Lord would make WindowslM in heaven, might this thing be? And
he said. Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes. but shalt not eat thereof. And there
were four leprous men at the entering in of [the] Gates. and they said to one anoth-
er Why sit we here until we die?" (2 Kings 7:2-3 KJV).

Without doubt. this passage portends the abject state of the four major software rivals
(Computer Associates. Lotus. Novell, and Borland) trying to develop timely, prof-
itable. terrestrial Windows applications while the full API remains unrevealed "in
heaven." Little wonder. then, that ••... they watched [the] Gates day and night to kill
him" (Acts 9:24 KJV).

17. 'The Liverpudlian (Scouse) gob is a derogatory "moulh" via lhe Gaelic for "beak," whence
"Shut yer gob!" is very close to lhe French "Ta gueule!"

126
 meta character

MBT n. [Memory Board Tagging.) (© Irish Business Machines). See PAGING.

media n. [From Latin medius, "middling, mediocre.") 1 General A member

of the set MULTIMEDIA. 2 Information dispersion Fourth in estates, fifth in
columns.
=>Although nominally the plural of "medium," media ;s now mandated as singular, as
if collectively to indict one common ratbag of lying, jarring bastards. The formal DP
plurals of "media" are "medias," "multimedia," and for maximum impact, "multime-
dias." Compare DATA.
medium n. See MEDIA; MULTIMEDIA.

memory n. 1 Human A repressed, palimpsestuous BWB. 2 DP A major

anthropomorphic fallacy. See also LINEAR; RAM; SEGMENTED.
memory leak n. OOP The inevitable loss of available RAM due to the insid-
ious proliferation of PERSISTENT OBJECTS. See also WORM.
mendacity sequence n. An ISO standard· sorting sequence allowing the F's
in a TRUTH TABLE to be ordered by degree of falsehood.
=>Thebasic sequence, in ascending order, is: lies; damn lies; statistics; damn statistics;
benchmarks; press releases; delivery promises; contradictionary entries. Further
refinements can be expected.
menu n. 1 Restaurant A list of priced options. 2 DP A list of unpriced
options. See also CASCADED.
=>A computer menu is sometimes kind enough to suggest that certain selections will
"take some time." This is a wonderful opportunity to play your Wagner CDs again.

meta· prefix [Greek meta, "behind, along with, beyond.") Adding a conflict-
ing range of meanings to any object, concept, or predicate in need of a new,
more intellectual lease of life. See METAPROGRAMMER; METACHARACTER.
=>Theprefix can be, and unfortunately is, applied repeatedly, as in metametalanguage,
"a language used to formulate a language used to formulate a language." ALGOL 84 and
ANSI-ISO SQL, to name but five, have employed even higher meta-level languages.
Etymologically, one might suggest that metameta, as "behind + beyond," is effective-
ly idempotent.
metacharacter n. 1 Sarcasm A GURU whose line is always busy. 2 UNIX
shells Any non-alphanumeric ASCn character.
=>The dearth of visible ASCII symbols available for shell scripts has forced a host of
non-literal, "meta-interpretations" on the thirty-two printable non-alphanumeric char-
acters, and therein lies the fun and popularity of UNIX. You often need to quote or
escape such metacharacters either to "restore" their literal meaning or to delay their

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meteprogrammer

interpretation by intercessory subshells. These feats, of course, are achieved using

metametacharacters. For example, a recent count of full-stop (period) meanings in var-
ious UNIX situations, gave eighteen exciting variants (nineteen if you include the ter-
mination of real character-string sentences). In some pattern-matching operations
(see REGULAREXPRESSIONS), the full-stop serves as a WH.OCARD. To search for a real,
non-meta full-stop, therefore, you must search for •.••. ' or \. Thus the
metametacharacters double-quote pairs, single-forward quote pairs, and backslash are
used to "de-meta" certain metacharacters, including possibly themselves, depending on
the shell and the context. SPACEPRECLUDES a discussion of the majestical, back-quoted
command. Clearly, nay, intuitively, double-quotes should quote all metacharacters
except $, " ., and \. Alas, those with WIDGET-clicking will never experience the
joy of correctly (eventually) escaping a double-quoted back-quoted expression. See
also DISQUOfATIONAL.

metaprogrammer n. Someone who is above programming but not yet ready

for software engineering.
~ I met a programmer a-walking one day;
"0 why aren't you coding?" to him I did say.
"I'm not a programmer, the truth I will tell,
But a metaprogrammer from meta-Novell!"

CHORUS Sperry Rand, Rand, Rand, Sperry Rand.

VERSE 2 "Pray what do you do there?" the stranger I asked,

"And what are you paid for each tough meta-task?"
"I just think about programs," the young man did say,
"For a mere meta-pittance of twelve meta-K."

CHORUS

VERSE 3 "And where do you come from?" I finally cried.

"I come from Hell;' the stranger replied.
"If you come from Hell, then tell me right plain
"How the hell you managed to get out again?"

CHORUS

VERSE 4 '''The way I got out, Sir, the truth I will tell:
They're turning the systems folk all out of Hell;
This is to make room for the people who sell,
For there's a great number of them at Novell."

CHORUS

VERSE 5 "Come all you salespersons, and take my advice;

Be fair to your prospects, and give a good price;
For if and you do not, I know very well,
You'll be in great danger of going to Hel1!"

128
 metric

CHORUS
(Based with approval on the traditional Durham ballad, "The Devil & the Poor
Pitman's Wife," from A. L. Lloyd's WMA collection Come All Ye Bold Miners.)

methodist n. 1 A follower of Lares Catervarius Constantinus (Larry

Constantine); one who stresses evangelical faith over theory and reasoning. 2
An Arminian METHODOLOGIST; one who believes that salvational software
development is available to the non-ACM elect.
methodologist n. One (usually of a pair) who perpetrates a METHODOLOGY.
See also METHODIST.
;;:;;;>Methodologists
study, classify, and (alas) mandate groups of methods, and no doubt
someone has to do it. But, can there be more than one methodology? Current parlance
implies that methodology is also the study of methodologies, a pursuit that, from anal-
ogous situations in other sciences, merits the term metamethodology. In fact, Peter G.
Neumann, then Editor of the ACM's SIGSOFr SEN (Software Engineering Notes,
January 1991) urges "metahodologists" to "make their technology more applicable to
real systems." This spelling could be the result of a spurious "a," but as a fan of
Neumann's way with words, I suspect a simple haplographic omission of the second
"met." Of course, a metahodologist (from the Irish "hod," the bricklayer's trough
hauled by Finnegan to "rise in the world") could be one who specializes in the lifting
and dropping of metabricks, which is not entirely irrelevant to software engineering
methodology.
Historians of methodology (not to be confused with methodical historiographers)
are intrigued not only by the dominance of "twinned" paradigms but by their implied
ethnic mix. Thus the Smith-Brown and Weiner-Langer methodologies are provably
less convincing than those of Smith-Weiner and Langer-Brown. The success of the
Kelly-Bootie methodology, for example, seems largely due to the widespread assump-
tion that it represents the unlikely convergence of Irish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. A
simpler approach sees that there is a large but countable number of diagrammatic per-
mutations employing squares and circles connected by arrowed lines of appropriate
intensity and acyclicity. The occasional agreement, across cultural barriers, on the
shapes of entities and the directions of their inter-relational arrows is inevitable but
apparently newsworthy.
methodology n. A method suffering from the prevalent 83 percent circum-
locuflationary spiral.
metric n. & adj. [Greek metrikos, "measurement."] 1 n. Programming The
futile assessment of coding effort, productivity, and reward, based on gema-
trial evaluations of source-code text and structure. 2 adj. (Of a mensurational
methodology) exporting the worst excesses of the French Revolution
(1789-1815). See DISMAL.

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Michie, Don.ld

~The LOC (lines of code) metric and its refinement LOCEVC (lines of code, exclud-
ing verbose comments) are clearly language-dependent, and have been suspect since
the invention of the SUBROlITINE (Wheeler and Wilkes, EDSAC It ca. 1950). With the
advent of huge APls, object-reusability, DLLs, 4GLs, and VISUAL programming, a
(lILOC) metric seems more promising with a bonus for effective comments. Care is
needed, though, with the growing number of development frameworks boasting that
"no code is required."
Other metrics, such as function-point, promoted by IFPUG (International Function-
Point Users Group), are less language dependent, but if a metric is known to influence
remuneration, programmers can surely be trusted to adjust their coding style accord·
ingly. See APIPHOBIA.

Michie, Donald (1923-) One of the few British AI pioneers not driven
abroad permanently by the Lighthill Report (1972) to seek more tolerant fund-
ing in the U.S.
~"Bring me your muddled masses ... " (The Statue of Liberty).

MICR n. [Magnetic-Ink Character Recognition.] A system for bouncing

checks of the wrong polarity. See also El3B.

micro- adj. 1 Incredibly large with respect to the pico-. 2 Vanishingly small
with respect to the giga-. 3 Quite normal in relation to objects of comparable
scale.

microprocessor n. 1 "Twenty years of architectural bungling concentrated

into a single chip" (M. V. Wilkes).

Microsoft Corporation also called MS; derog. Microsloth; laud. The

mM of the 19908. The dominant marketing force in os and applications soft-
ware, beyond the slings and arrows of bankrupted rivals' mockery; also well-
beyond any interference from ACLU, ANSI-ISO, FCC, all Monopolies'
Commissions, GATT, NATO, and the UN Security Council. See also
DINOSAURS; MS-DOS; GATES, WILLIAM; IBM; MAW; UNDOCUMENTED; WINDOWS.

~As with ffiM's dominance in the 60s-70s, the supremacy of Microsoft in the 80s-
90s proves that innovation and sworn delivery promises should never be allowed to
interfere with marketing. Another depressing ffiM-MS parallel is that defeated com-
petitors invoke conspiracies and scream MONOPOLY.

mlddle-out adj. Relating to yet another revolutionary software development

METHODOLOGY, allowing progress up or down as the mood of the team dic-
tates. Compare BOITOM-DOWN; BOITOM-UP; TOP-DOWN; WATERFALL.

~The top-downlbottom-up schism is now confined to those computing backwaters

where the DP VOGUE magazine arrives two weeks late. The middle-out approach allows
an early, honest, and reassuring report to the DPM that the project is "definitely about

130
 mlnl-strlng

half-way." The middle-outer sees no contradiction in the proposition that one can break
down vague tasks into precise subtasks and, at the same time, integrate ill-conceived
CLASses into well-defined hierarchies.

mlddleware n. 1 Les jarretelles noires de ma CORRECTRICE. 2 Les jarretelles

rouges de ma correctrice. 3 Packages promulgated by independent mid-
dlepersons for the traditional 10 percent handling fee. 4 Les jarretelles blanch-
es de ma correctrice. 5 The "f' in CLIENT/SERVER.
;;;;;>Atone time a well-defined partitioning of wariness could be discerned in the DP
marketplace, but of late the question "who-does-what-with-what-to-whom-and-when"
admits of no crisp resolution. See also OEM.

A sales pitch of daunting verbosity

Has dampened our mild curiosity;
Our spirits are quailed, for we are assailed
With wares of wide-ranging viscosity!
(M. Prospect Merrime)

"Hardware, Software, Firmware, Middleware, Wetware, Vaporware!

"The most important is to be-ware!"
(J. P. Sartrul)

Mllken Math n. [After Michael Milken, financial wunderkind of the 1980s.]

;;;;;>Thejunked, cleanly collared bond dealer, is reported to have given, in lieu of jail
time, a mathematics course to third-, fourth-, and fifth graders at an elementary school
in Harlem, NY. No details were given but one wonders if the exercises included typi-
cal dealer calculations: X buys 100,000 shares at $10 each and sells at them at $25.
Assuming that three insiders are each paid $40,000, the Feds fine you $80,000, and
you donate $50,000 to a school in Harlem, what's your net rake after tax-and remem-
ber, we don't pay no taxes! (See the movie "Robin and the Seven Hoods.")

mini n. Abbrev. minicomputer. The no-man's land (sometimes called Digital)

between mainframe/supermini and workstationlsupermicro/micro.
;;;;;>Aswith "miniskirt," the defining size and price/performance ranges lack precision
but are known when experienced.

mlnlmal-cost path adj. (Of an algorithm) a rule for the out-on-a-limb tree-
bound advising them to stay where they are until the pruner arrives.

mini-string n. [Origin: "When pain and anguish wring the browJA mini-
string Angel, Thou!"]. ALso called G-string. An expression of DENIER 14 or
less, allowing a glimpse of the shape of strings to come. Compare NULL
STRING.

MIPS n. 1 [Acronym for Mega-Instructions Per Second.] An EPA-type

131
MIS

assessment of CPU power, to be used for comparisons only. Your own perfor-
mance will vary depending upon the bus driver, and will almost certainly be
lower in California. Compare FLOPS. 2 [Acronym for Microprocessor with
Interlocked Pipeline Stages] A RISC chip developed at Stanford, now chiefly
used to MORPH images of Arnold Schwarzenegger ..

MIS n. [Origin: acronymic, or from prefix mis-, badly, wrongly] 1 Manager

Information Systems. 2 [Oxymoron] Military Intelligence Service. See also
DPM; MAINFRAME.

misfiled books n. Also called the librarian's nightmare. See the follow-
ing table.

TItle Flled Under

The Mouse That Roared GUI
The Bourne Conspiracy Shells, UNIX.
The Norton Book of Classical Literature Early OOS/Symantec Utilities
The Book of J APL dialects
Five Graves to Cairo Microsoft OS History
The Chicago Manual of Style Microsoft OS Tutorials
The Vanished Library Microsoft NT
Equimultiplicity and Blowing Up Balkan history
Motions of Coupled Bodies about a Fixed Point Adult
String too short to be saved C programming
OOPS! What to Do When Things Go Wrong Object-oriented Technology
Le sysreme des objets OOP
CASE Closed Software Engineering
The Shell and the Kernel:
Renewals of Psychoanalysis UNIX debugging
Of Mice and Men GUI Ergonomics

mlsslon-crltlcal adj. 1 (Of a missile-guidance system) unlikely under nor-

mal circumstances, touch wood, to vaporize the wrong continent, but can't be
too careful, old boy, what? 2 (Of a computer dating service) rarely matching
a female serial killer with Rush Limbaugh. 3 (Of a Fourier Transform) avoid-
ing Jack Crenshaw's algorithms. 4 (Of a payroll program) able to round-off
FED_TAX_DUE in favor of the corporation. 5 (Of a San Juan Capistrano
tourist) pissed off by the swallows' late return.

MIT Abbrev. 1 Milled In Transit. 2 Most Important Test.

=>Also used for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the cradle of AI and (almost)
the grave of NEURAL networks.

132
 module

mnemonic n.
~I had a wildly funny definition of this, but. .. oh, it may come back ...

modal adj. (Of a WINDOWS control) gaining the focus of attention and mark-
ing the stark transition from a friendly, EVENT-DRIVEN, parallel, democratic
regime to an in-your-interface, sequential Faschismus. See also DIALOG BOX.
~Fully endowed MULTIMEDIA platforms will signal the onset of modality by display-
ing video clips from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens.

Modula, Modula-N n. A sequence of Pascalian improvements (with N

monotonously increasing) ignored by Borland and, eventually, by Ould Nick
himself. See also PASCAL MANUAL; WIRI"H, NlKLAUS.
modular adj. [Origin: Scottish proverb, "Mony a modular mickle maks a
muckle."] 1 Hardware Heterogeneous; likely to disintegrate; pertaining to a
device in which repairs are effected by changing every module. 2 Software
Broken down; relating to a program which has been arbitrarily partitioned as
a hedge against programming staff redundancies. Compare MONOLITHIC.

module n. [Latin modulus, diminutive of modus, "a small measure."] 1

Hardware Any portion of a system that can falloff during shipment; any ele-
ment in a system which can be replaced but not mended. 2 Software A frag-
ment with good intentions. See also MODULAR.
~ Was it not, however, Florence Nightingale who said "Intentions is not enough"? And
was it not an equally wise but drunken old sailor, shangaied from Liverpool by the
notorious boarding-house master Paddy West, who in the eponymous fore'bitter sang:

"But the best of intentions, they never get far,

"After forty-two days on the floor of a bar."

The crunch is marketo-Iinguistical, namely that module sounds and sells better than
fragment.
"Wanna hot deal on Fragmenta-2?"
"No thanks."
"It's free, just pay for the media."
"Er, no thanks."
"OK, my final offer, it's free and the media's free."
"Is it shrinkwrapped?"
"Not necessarily."
"Is it copy-protected?"
"Not intentionally."
"How many floppies?"
"Eight."
"What make?"

133
monadic

"The best: genuinely generic 5 1/4 high density"

"No, really, thanks all the same."
"I'll throw in a debugger, profiler and personal time-management app."
"Hmm-what about run-time license fees?"
"We can discuss that later if you get something running... "
"Look, call me next month sometime willya, I'm in a meeting right now."
In majestic, authoritative Latin, even the diminutive modulus carries considerable
clout, and euphony, to boot. But, to be old-fashioned, the correct plural of "modulus"
is,jure divino, "moduli," and many potential users in Dead Language Departments will
not touch Modula-n with a bargepole, for any n : CARDINAL;.
ETH may sneer at these lost-sales, but they should remember Peter Fellgett's warn-
ing in the 19608 that no half-decently educated person would dream of buying hi-fi
equipment described as quadraphonic, an adjective that grotesquely mixes Latin and
Greek roots. The hi-phi-Iistines (headed, in this context, presumably by Panasonic)
turned down Peter's etymologically sound alternatives: tetraphonic or quadrasonic.
Stereophones are still solidly with us, thanks to the homogeneity of the roots (both
Greek), but the Quadraphonic craze came and went like a thief in the night. QED!
Quad erat demonstrandum-the Quad is still in the showroom!

monadic adj. 1 (Of a DoD benchmark) leading to the one true ADA. 2 (Of a
function or operator) exposed to a single ARGUMENT. Compare NILADIC;
DYADIC.

~The professional pride of library builders has reduced the number of boring niladic
and monadic functions. Self-respecting APIS call for an average of at least five para-
meters per call. The popularity of c is largely due to the ellipsis ( ... ), used to indicate
that the function allows an arbitrary number of arguments. If a function is unavoidably
monadic, self-esteem can be restored by insisting that the data types of the argument
and return value are both dauntingly arcane. C offers no barriers to such face-saving.

monist n. 1 Metaphysics One who sees all things as ineluctably intercon-

nected through the agency of some apodictic cosmic principle. 2 Computer
science One who accepts the inevitability of SIDE-EFFECfS. 3 Chaos theory
One who sees the typhoon caused by the fluttering butterfly. 4 Entomology
One who sees the fluttering of the butterfly caused by the typhoon.
~Not all monists agree as to the precise nature of reality's base groundhog or its ulti-
mate knowability. Suffice it to say that every monistic eisegesis is subsumed by my
own (patents pending), widely promoted via the Kuhnian bumper sticker: Shifts
Happen.
monolithic adj. Pertaining to a class of devices rendered obsolete by the
invention of modularity. Compare MODULAR.
~This demise is sad because when a monolithic unit broke down, the engineer sim-
ply changed the lith.

134
 mouse

monopoly n. 1 Physics The dominant (usu. Northern) half of a magnet. 2

Business An enterprise about to be sued by its vanquished competitors.
~There is no answer to Screaming Lord Such's sublime cry: "Why is there only one
Monopo]ies Commission?"

monotonic adj. 1 Music Composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. 2

Mathematics If increasing then non-decreasing, else if decreasing then non-
increasing. 3 Logic Used mainly in the negative form, non-monotonic: a form
of logic where you are allowed to change your mind.

Monte Carlo Method [Origin: after Count Montgomery de Carlo, Italian

gambler and random-number generator (1792-1838).] A method of jazzing up
the action in certain statistical and number-analytic environments by setting
up a book and inviting bets on the outcome of a computation.
,
;;;;)The Count's original system was stolen by Lord Kelvin in ]90], and subsequently
refined by Fermi, Ulam, and von Neumann during World War II to solve the many
problems faced by belligerent neutrons in a game of Russian roulette. The Monte Carlo
method spread like the vogue in the postwar United States, attracting, inevitably, an
underground of seedy odds fixers, numbers racketeers, and heavy, protectionist mus-
cle dons. The method was banned outside Nevada, Atlantic City, and eponymous
regions of Europe, but is now built into the PENTIUM FPU.

morph n. & v. trans. 1 n. Linguistics Back-formed from morpheme: a gram-

matical or syntactical unit with no meaningful substrings. 2 v. trans. Graphics
To animate via a jerky succession of intermediate images.
;;;;)Cynics have suggested that both meanings can be traced back to morphine, "an
addictive sedative."

mount v. trans. [Origin: "Suffer the little peripherals to come unto me" (St.
Presper's Sermon on the Mount). To expose (an item of hardware) to the
vagaries of the software or to elicit the response that the specified item is
unready or nonexistent.

mouse n. & v. intrans. 1 n. "An animal which strews its path with fainting
women" (Ambrose Bierce). 2 Windows n. A device which strews its path with
fainting applications. 3 GUI n. The irredeemable nadir of DP culture, repre-
senting the victory of Disney over Descartes; a cumbersome, infantile, mis-
named, monogonadic pointing device used by WIMPS to transmit positional
data and button events to a sluggish, RAM-starved message queue. 4 v.
intrans. To appear productive while idly playing with a mouse, as in "mous-
ing around." See also CHORDING; CLICK; GUI; MOUSE BALL; MOUSE PAD.
;;;;)The critics who reject the verb mouse as modem technobabb]e are referred to ]6th
century citations in Webster III. That babbler W. Shakespeare wrote ••... death ... feasts,

135
mouse ball

mousing the flesh of men," and the Restoration dramatist Wvcherlev (1641-1715) tells
of" ... naughty women ... whom they lOused and moused."

mouse ball n. A rubbery sphere that rotates chaotically as its owning MOUSE
skates over and beyond the MOUSE PAD.

~Unlike the Old World Muridae and the New World Cricetidae, the pandemic Mus
graphicus is Hitlerian in the testicular department:

"Hitler has only got one ball;

"Goering has two, but rather small;
"Himmler is somewhat simmler,
"But poor old Goebbels
"Has no balls at all ,"
(Anon. World War II ballad)

mouse pad n. A sponge mat protecting a small area of your (real) desk top
from MOUSE BALL skid marks. See also DESKTOP; DRAGGING; DRAG'N'DROP;
DROP'N'DRAG.

~The mouse pad is yet another costly OUI ANCILLARY, spawning its own hi-tech indus-
try comparable in hype and irrelevance to the athletic footwear market. Jaundiced users
have found that they can save money by treating their desk surfaces with a mixture of
sand and Guinness.

MOZ DONG n. CURt'ATION of Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

and Lorenzo da Ponte, as performed by the computerized billing ensemble of
the International Preview Society, Great Neck (sic), N.Y. See the accompany-
ing illustration.
~From Mozart to Edward Lear in one curtation, or as Fritz Spiegl once said, "From
the sublime to the cor'blimey."

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MS-DOS \pronounced messy-doss\ MICROSOFr Disk Operating System See
OS; DOS.

136
 MTTR

MSR n. Multiple-Source Responsibility. A major feature of the SNA protocol

in the OEM environment. Under earlier SSR (Singular Source Responsibility)
implementations, the end user enjoyed but one, often receding, target for liti-
gation. See also REVERSED CLASS AcrION.

MT \pronounced empty\ I Machine Translation. 2 MisTranslation. 3 The

eponymous journal (b. 1954). See also KBMT; NLP.

MTBF n. [Mean Time Between Failure.] A design parameter set by the man-
ufacturer, based on the known tolerance of the user and the targeted prof-
itability of the service department. Compare MITR.
::>Manufacturers have long been aware that too high a value for the MTBF (measured,
usually in decades or fractions of decades) leads to a stultifying sense of boredom and
complacency on the part of the user. The thoughtful supplier ensures that the user is
exposed to the excitement of real breakdowns at reasonable intervals. Lifeboat-drill
simulations are no substitute for that first actual mid-payroll catastrophe. The initial
panic and wringing of throats soon gives way to the familiar elation of the front-line
soldier under fire: sinews are stiffened, blood is summoned. On-site unity is magical-
ly rewoven as an almost forgotten camaraderie emerges to weather the blitz. "For the
DPM shall lie down with the analyst, yea, even the programmer shall lie down with the
punchperson."-St. Presper's Epistolary Update to the Pascalites, Level II, release ix.
The traditional supplier/user frictions also, surprisingly, disappear, since the user is
now, as it were, a born-again nonuser, and by definition a prospect for something.
Long-forgotten salespersons will arrive to offer condolences and quotations for
extended service: contracts, add-ons, standby units, upgrades, and newly released
working software. Eventually, the peaceful boredom of uptime will be restored, pris-
oners exchanged, scapegoats tried and executed, memorials erected to lost files, and a
candle placed on the console to honor the Unknown Coder. Years later, unblooded
recruits will hold their manhoods cheap for missing the Great Crash of '78.

MTTR n. [Mean Time To Repair. Origin: mean "poor or inferior in grade or

quality" + repair "to take off": as "Let's repair to the bar."] The possible sum
of the following series, for which there are no easy convergence tests:

MTfNF Mean Time To Notice Fault

M'ITRTF Mean Time To React To Fault
MTI1..FEPN Mean Time To Locate Field Engineer's Phone Number
MTICFE Mean Time To Call Field Engineer
MTAFECB Mean TIme Awaiting Field Engineer's Call Back
MTICSC Mean Time To Check Service Contract
MTICFES Mean Time To Call Field Engineer's Superior
MTI1..TFEDBS Mean Time To Listen To FE's Disclaimer Blaming Software
MTICA Mean TIme To Call Attorney
MTFFETA Mean TIme For Field Engineer To Arrive

137
multI-

MTfD Mean Time To Diagnose

MTILTFEDBS Mean Time To Listen To FE's Disclaimer Blaming Software
MTOOSCM x M# Mean Time Ordering/Obtaining Software/Changing Modules
multiplied by number of Modules
MTTRB Mean Time To ReBoot
MTTRRB Mean Time To ReReBoot
goto MTfD
::)Some of the above labels, innocently though they fallon Indo-European
ears, have offended Basque and Samoyed users. The Clean Up Naughty Tags
committee of IFIP is frantically planning discussions for 1996. Watch this
headword in future editions.

multl- prefix 1 Performing n functions or having n putative states, where n ~

2: as, MULTIPROCESSING (read ~ as "not much greater than"). 2 Performing no
individual aspect of: as, MULTITASKING.
::)But the greatest of these is multi paradigmatic.

MULTICS See SARCONYM.

multljobblng n. Elementary moonlighting in which people modestly

endeavor to widen their DP experience, in their free time, by assuming addi-
tional duties in disparate environments without boasting of their enterprise to
their mainstream employer. Compare MULTITASKING.
::)1YPically, in the 19708, the DPM at a UNIVAC 1100 site could usefully multijob by
becoming a covert third-shift operator at a nea,rbyffiM 370 installation, and vice versa.

multimedia n. \pronounced mult-eye-meed-eye-yah.\ An application attack-

ing all five senses of the user-sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch-but
especially, smell. See also CD-ROM; MEDIA.

multiplex v. trans. [From multi- "slightly more than one" + contraction of

perplex "to bewilder."] To confuse (a device or person) by subdividing a prob-
lem and applying the pieces in parallel.

multiprocessing n. The simultaneous processing of not many more than

two portions of the same program on different units, e.g., on the mainframe
CPU and the programmer's hand-held calculator.

multitasking n. An advanced form of moonlighting in which the supple-

mentary jobs are generated in a natural way from the multitasker's main
duties. Compare MULTIJOBBING.
::)1Ypically, a multitasking programmer will write packages during the day for his pri-
mary employer and spend the evenings correcting them at user sites as a freelance con-
sultant.

138
 MUSE

MUM n. [Acronym for Multi-Use Mnemonics.] A meta-mnemonic methodol-

ogy whereby one acronym references all the features of a particular system.

~Offsetting the advantage of having only one acronymic form to remember, there is,
one is bound to admit, an attendant increase in ambiguity. In the case of the EmELRED
os, for example, which vicariously assigns TPD to all aspects of the system, the MUM
preamble points out that "the meaning of TPD is almost always clear from the context.
The user should always use TPD (or the wild card 711 which defaults to TPD) and trust
the OS to apply the best guess." Current ISO regulations forbid the use of the acronym
MUM within a MUM schema, although some churches allow a lambda-MUM calcu-
lus whereby acronyms are distinguished from the names of the acronyms.

MUMPS [Acronym for MGH Utility Multi-Programming Systems where

MGH is Massachusetts General Hospital.]

~The language has now been further abbreviated to M,leading its supporters to claim
a IO-fold advantage over C. MUMPS also enjoys related acronyms: GERMS (Global
Effective Retrieval from Mass Storage) and FEVER (Functions Evaluated by Very
Effective Routines) "MUMPS means never having to say you're sorting" (Daniel P. B.
Smith).

MUNIFICENT [Acronym for Most Unworthy Numerical Integrator Now

Functioning In China; Evaluations Not Trustworthy.] Kai Lung Computers
Inc. (1950)

~Emest Bramah's delicate self-effacement may now be considered ethno-offensive.

Murphy's law of Programming [Formulated by H. Ledgard, 1975.] ''The

sooner you start coding your program, the longer it is going to take." See also
TNHD at Sod's Law.

MUSE n. [Acronym for Most Unusual Shakespearian Engine.]

O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invent-i-on.

(Shakespeare, Henry V)
~The author has proved elsewhere (Computer Weekly, March 1969), with Rowseian
certainty, that Shakespeare spent his 10 "missing" years, 1582-1591, developing
MUSE, the first data processing system. Let the following quotations suffice:

The AND. W instruction used to clear a word: "AND, in a WORD, but even now
worth this, and now worth NOfHING" (The Merchant of Venice. act I, scene I).

The value of conditional statements: " ... you may avoid that too with an IF ... much
virtue in an IF' (As You Like It. act 5, scene 4).

139
~Brlgg.1Ypelnd~or

The frustrations of debugging: "Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to

plague the inventor." (Macbeth, act I, scene 7)

Programming seems to have been a more dramatic occupation in Elizabethan times.

For example, variables were boldly declaimed, not meekly declared. A typical variable
declamation would have been:

"0 Union Strong and Structure Noble,

"I give Thee X, both Int and Global!
"And oft-used, unsigned, whorish y.
"Get Thee to a Register, hie!

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator n. also MBTI. A set of abbreviations built

from letters indicating basic personality traits.
~Thus E = Extrovert; I = Introvert; S = Sensor; N = Intuitive (you might say that "f'
was more intuitive but that would clash with Introvert!); T = Thinker; F = Feeler; J =
=
Judger; P Perceiver, and so on. Pairs and triplets of these provide higher-level types;
for example, Rational is IntuitivelIbinking or NT (hardly a coincidence). (See Patricia
Femandi, Software Development Magazine, July 1994.)

my program n. A gem of algoristic precision, offering the most sublime bal-

ance between compact, efficient coding on the one hand, and fully comment-
ed legibility for posterity on the other. Compare LESS mAN; YOUR PROGRAM.

140
N
nack n. [Origin: corruption of vulg. knackered "castrated, rendered knacker-
less, impotentated."] A signal indicating that all is lost. Compare ACK.
:::>Fritz Spiegl has traced knacker to the obscure Thrkish military "jangling johnny," a
coarse, step-keeping percussion instrument worn around the waist and a constant threat
to the player's vital parts. It was revived by Jacquie and Bridie, with government-man-
dated safety features, as the Lagerphone in the 19505 Skiffie movement.

namespace n. The ever-shrinking region within which an identifier identi-

fies. See also LEXICAL SCOPE; OVERLOADING.

:::>The newly reserved word namespace in c++ is widely welcomed as a mechanism

that reduces the problems of name overloading, esp. the grotesque polysemies of sta-
tic and the lot that's known as 1.

Namespaces of the rich and famous See NEWfON.

nametlme n. The moment when the winner of the ACM TURING Award is
announced.
:::>"Mr. Bachman ... has received seventeen patents, the ACM Touring Award and is a
distinguished fellow of the British Computer Society." (Brochure for the 1991 CASE
WORLD Conference and Exposition). Joseph Kusmiss has noted that Bachman might
one day qualify for the Noble Prize. To gain the Touring Award, one assumes that you
must have darkly cruised the back streets of Manchester, or perhaps built up an impres-
sive frequent-flyer mileage by following the non-stop ACM conference caravanserai-
no real hardship if you have the time and funding. I know that I enjoyed the 1991 ACM
CHI conference in New Orleans and even met participants who had no idea that the
Jazz Festival was running concurrently.

NAN [Not A Number] A set of bits known as a number to Rene Magritte but
rejected by the IEEE FLOATING-POINT Polizei.

nand v. trans. &: adj. [Acronym for Not AND.] 1 v. trans. To unconjunct (sev-
eral binary victims) in the Boolean environment. 2 adj. (Of a GATE) being able
to nand. See also XAND.

nanosecond n. 1 1()-9 seconds, vividly illustrated by Grace Hopper's piece

of wire. 2 The elapsed time between the traffic lights turning green and a honk
from the car behind you. 3 The elapsed time between the signing of a Balkan
cease-fire and the next shell falling on Sarajevo.
:::>Alas, Amazing Grace, inventor of COBOL and the first one, they say, to trap a real,
literal bug, is no longer with us. On the bright side, though, she has moved on to the

141
nanotechnology

bug-free branch of Elysium reserved for computer pioneers. I met the imposing
Admiral several times when she visited the pre-Burroughs. indeed the pre-Sperry,
Univac offices in London. However, I never saw her famous "rope trick," whereby she
demonstrated that light took I nanosecond to traverse the 0.3 meters of purloined tele-
phone wire dramatically produced from her handbag.

nanotechnology n. A'quark with an outboard motor.

Natural C n. An extension of ANSI-ISO C providing certain NL enhance-
ments. See also c+-.
~An NLP prophet writes:
For all you UL (Unnatural Language) programmers, time is indeed flying like an
arrow. But are you NL-ready? Soon you must burn all those boringly precise Backus-
Naur Forms and face more subtle morphological challenges. As the Nayland Letter
(Fall 1987), quoting from Tom Hopkins's "Official Guide to Success-When to Jump
Ship," puts it, in a passage helpfully crisp, and yet at the same time blandly ineffec-
tive:'6 "When it's plain that your job is in jeopardy for causes beyond your control,
don't wait.. ..Open up your mind to new ideas. You need new job skills. Do what you
have to do to get them,"
Unfortunately, the reader is left a tad in the dark as to what skills to acquire and
where and how to develop them. Let me fill this void! My own Standards Institute,
STANSI, is launching Natural C as a bridge between UL and NL, a gentle easing into
the new regime. Natural C can be considered as a loose superset of the popular ANSI
C, so there is little to unlearn. The chief extensions are that there are 250,000 addi-
tional keywords, all identifiers have gender, number and case, while all operators have
mood, tense, voice, and aspect. The new language will be initially defined with the tra-
ditional informality of K&R (1978). It is expected that the language will quickly evolve
into mutually incompatible dialects, of which one or two will emerge as dominant,
proving that we are well on the way to achieving all the benefits of real NL. For the
moment, we propose three gender keywords: masc, fern, and neut; three numbers:
sing, plur, and nul (matching the Basque indefinite); seven cases: nom, VOC, ace, gen,
dat, abl, and abessive (the latter under pressure from our Finnish colleagues). Space
permits just a few tantalizing examples:
Ivalues usually take the accusative or abessive, but objects being pointed at take the
dative. Addressing a variable naturally calls for the vocative. Structure membership
requires the genitive. Regular identifiers are declared with gender and nominative
only; irregular identifiers may require the declaration of other parts of speech.
Expressions on each side of an assignment must agree in gender and number using
explicit casts where needed:
int masc sus; II sus is nom [sus, se, sum, si, so,
so, sutta]

18, A figure of speech called the expansive oxymoron or mUlllleridllism, after the English wriler
and TV personality. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-).

142
 int rnasc *fo; II fo is dative [fus, fe, fum, fi, fo,
fo, futta]
(acc) fo = &se; II se is voc of sus
float fern floa; II floa is nom [floa. floa. floam,
floae, floae, floa, floatta]
char neut chum; II chum is nom [chum. chum. chum, chi,
cho, cho, chutta]
sum = (rnasc) floa; II sum is rnasc. acc, floa is fern.
nom
sutta = 0; II zero assignments take the abessive
Note that = (assignment) is indicative, active, present whereas in

if (sus == (rnasc) floa) { ... }

the == is subjunctive, with both expressions nominative. In my next release, I'll dis-
cuss unions taking the genitive plural and what to do if a masculine function returns a
feminine pointer to an array of neuter pointers.

natural language also NL. n. 1 LISP without the parentheses. 2 An overly

high-level language lacking algorithmic precision and similar artificial addi-
tives, and therefore beyond the clutches of most compilers. See ENGLISH; NLP.

natural language front-end n. A system that prompts for the input of an

arbitrary string, X, and responds with the message "What do you mean by X?"

naturaller adj. (Of a computer language) gooder than natural; able to cope
with the nuances of DP grammar.

NEBULA [Acronym for NEw BUsiness LAnguage.] Ferranti Ltd. (ca. 1960).
~ Yet another language lorst'n' gom, but worthy of mention since the acronym relates
pleasantly to Ferranti's galaxy of my tho-astronomical hardware: Pegasus, Sirius,
Mercury, Orion, and Atlas. There was also an Atlas variant at the Cambridge
University Mathematical Laboratory, UK, called the Titan. It was never clear how "lit-
erally" one should take these classical allusions. For example, according to Thomas
Bulfinch, all twelve Titans were consigned to the pit, level-O, by Jupiter's thunderbolts.

negatlon-aa-fallure Also negation-by-fallure n. Logic programming 1The

reasonable assumption that P is false if one has failed to prove that P is true.
2 The unreasonable assumption that P is false if others have failed to prove
that P is true. 3 Drugs The ineffectiveness of the "Just Say No!" campaign.

nerd n. [Origin obscure. Possibly Cockney rhyming slang: turd.] Vulgar, rare
fem. nerdette, nerderlna, nerdotchka. "One who considers INTERNET a dat-
ing service" (Guy Kawasaki). Compare KNERD.

nest n. & v. trans. [Origin: first used on English Electric KDF9 system,
Kidsgrove, England (1962).] 1 n. A well-feathered STACK where data and

143
netwok

insb11ctions can be mother-henned and incubated for indefinite periods. 2 v.

trans. To expose (loops, subroutines) to premature and/or unexpected CALLS.
To each such exposure a positive integer, known as the depth, is assigned,
indicating the approximate number of person-months needed to correct the
situation.
~ New string vests for ALGOL compilers;
A night on the nest with KDFgers;
Palimpsestuous programs with nebulous wings,
These are a few of my favorite things.

netwok n. [Origin: a large Oriental colander.] A NE1WORK running under the

CHINESE VMOS protocol, whence the anthem "You'll never WOK alone."

network n. & v. trans. [From net "reduced slightly from gross" + "work."] 1
n. The anti synergetic interconnection of noncompatible nodal systems divid-
ed by a common protocol. 2 v. trans. To reduce [net] the work rate (of a com-
puting resource) by adding it to a network.

neural adj. (Of a NE1WORK) nerve-wracking, esp. when successful for no

known reason.

new v. trans. c++ 1 To create (a dynamic heap object) using the global C++
operator new or a version of new as overridden by some distant idiot. 2 To
bloat (an .EXE) by inadvertently pulling in 80K of exception-handling code.
~ The verbing of those computer-language commands, functions, and operators that
have a nounal, adjectival, or adverbial surface morphology is one of the many joys of
DP usage, although (or because) it upsets some prescriptionists. It is certainly unam-
biguously compact to write "If you new foo, you must delete foo," or "foo having been
newed, it must be deleted."

newton n. The force required to propel a hand-held message pad with an

acceleration of 2.20462 meters per second per second.
~To achieve maximum rejection velocity, users should first remove the stylus and bat-
tery. Ironically, Apple's Newton PDA has a giveaway logo. It's one of those sudden-
thunk light-bulbs, but close inspection reveals a short-lived filament exposed to the air.
Some think that the naming of products for'9 famous, often unrelated, persons has
"gone far too far." Indeed, it is now hard to distinguish the entries in the Cambridge
Biographical Dictionary from a ComputerS hopper index. Thus Euclid, Plato,
Beethoven, Newton, Mozart, da Vinci, Babbage, Turing, Cray [Shurely some mishtake
here ... Ed.), Pascal, Ada, and Einstein have been proudly subjected to PRODUCTIZATION.
Also, meet ADB Inc's MATISSE, the 00 database presumably full of objets fauves.

19. Brits name things after people, living or dead; the U.S. preference is naminJtfor, suuestinll
that the namer is granting a favor to the named.

144
 NL

More offensive, hovering near blasphemy, are the theophanous products such as lam
and Tiger Software's modem called Shiva ("built to last!"). See also RAM;ONOMANCY.
Is it a coincidence that Sir Isaac Himself has endured some ridiculous Newton-
bashing recently? His Principia has been degraded from "the greatest work of the
human mind" (Lagrange) and "a monument to the profundity of genius" (Laplace) to
"a mess, ugly, an obscure mess" (C. Truesdell) and "so poorly written, so painfully dif-
ficult to read, and so wrong in so much of its substance" (R. Weinstock). [The College
Mathematics Journal 25, no. 3 (May 1994).J

NeXT 1 n. Steve Jobs's, ex-black box. 2 interj. The dismissive cry heard at
theatrical auditions. See also JOBS' COMFORTERS; X, CURSE OF.
NIH adj. [Abbrev. Not Invented Here.] Pertaining to a much respected and
widely practiced branch of design philosophy, unique among philosophical
"schools" in that, by definition, the adherents refuse to talk to one another.
Motivated by a fanatical hatred of plagiarism, NIH followers selflessly limit
the domain of their responsibilities to their own humble artifacts. See also
WHEEL.

niladic adj. (Of a function or operator) joyously free from any intruding
ARGUMENTS. Compare MONADIC; DYADIC.

Nlntendlnltls n. Any disease blamed on excessive exposure to electronic

games. See also VIDEO GAME.

~The term was coined by Dr. Richard Brasington of the Marshfield Clinic,
Wisconsin, after treating a patient for "sore thumb" caused by five hours of nonstop
button pushing. More seriously, there have been reports, blessedly rare, of gamesters
who suffer epileptic seizures after prolonged joy-sticking. Players with a condition
known as photosensitive epilepsy can experience such attacks when watching flicker-
ing patterns, exploding lights, rapid movements, and eviscerating Samurai on a video
screen.
The number of video game titles is quite staggering and resists any simple analy-
sis. Many are clearly cerebral and educational, such as Chess and Where on Earth Is
China?, but the majority appear to be aimed at young males, with an alarming empha-
sis on blood'n' guts aggression and New Age occultism. Megan Duffin of the National
Coalition on TV Violence estimates that 71 percent of video games include violence
of one sort or another. Duffin also cites studies that show a measurable increase in
aggressive behavior by children who play regularly.
Although some psychologists assert that kids can distinguish real violence from
make-believe, most observers are disturbed by the amount of time and money expend-
ed by the young in the mindless zapping of alien sprites. Some coordination skills may
be acquired but can we support the claim that playing Slime-Monster somehow cures
children of computerphobia. Can anything prepare our youth for the horrors of PRINTF?

NL See NATURAL LANGUAGE.

145
NLP

NLP n. [Natural Language Processing] No parseran!, "They shall not parse!"

(Barricade battle-cry of the Dreyfus Brigade). See also AI; ENGLISH; KBMT; MT;
WEAVER FISH.

=>The optimism of the 19505 was that the syntactical-semantic gulf could be bridged
by extracting lexemes and "looking them up" in a dictionary file. Alas, even when the
dictionary was replaced by an increasingly complex thesaurus, the dream flickered and
died with Bar-Hillel's boxed pens and penned boxes. There was much talk about auto-
matically tagging words as noun, verb, et al., the MT version of "belling-the-cat." It
assumed that NL words carried predeclared data types. The polysemous truth is that
even the ubiquitous street-walking, hill-climbing "Bill" can suddenly show up as a
verb, impersonal noun (or, horror, as a second William appearing in the story) leading
to the big, intractable crux known as "contextual disambiguation." The equally naive
classification of agents and actions as "human," "inanimate," etc., hits the same brick
wall. Compare Suereth's rule20 "Only humans can drive" with "I drove the car; the car
drove me mad."

Nobel Prize Winners In Computer Science n. See NULL SET.

=>The nearest candidate for this honor was Sir Henry Ninebit-Byte (1912-1978),
inventor of very wide paper tape, who was knighted in 1974 for "his invaluable ser-
vices to the punch-card industry." His computerized Nobel Prize selection package was
much admired until his own name occurred in five different categories during the 1977
dry run. Although he received the 1978 British Computer Society Silicon Medal for
devious software, the Nobel Prize scandal proved fatal, and he succumbed to a mas-
sive attack of disgrace.

noise n. 1Marketing The raucous celebration of an order, aimed at swamp-

ing all signals from the design and manufacturing departments. 2 Information
theory Illegible messages from Zatetic Venusians and Middle Earthers who
have not yet mastered TCPIIP.21 3 Electronics The thousand shades of grass
that flesh is HAIR to.

non- prefix. A hint that the following attribute or device is not available for
immediate delivery, but that a sufficiently firm letter of intent might well
secure a less dogmatic evaluation leading to a favored position in the waiting
list. Compare NOT-; UN-.

NOP n. \pronounced nop or no op\ Also called NOOP or NO-OP. ASSEMBLY

language mnemonic for "no operation." A uniquely benign, do-nothing
instruction giving the CPU a brief, one-cycle respite.

20. Russell Suerelh, "A Natural Language Processor," C User's Journal. April 1993.
21. Likewise, some claim that cosmic rays are failed experiments in beaming down visitors from
outer space.

146
 null'"

~To be uncharacteristically pedantic, NOP does perform an operation: the PC (pro-

gram counter) is incremented to the next instruction. NOP typically occupies a word
in the object code, and can therefore be used to delete an instruction in situ, rather like
punching all holes in a paper tape. Aliter, assembly language Nostradami can preplant
NOPs for subsequent patching.

nor v. trans. & adj. [Acronym for Not OR.] 1 v. trans. To undisjunct (several
binary victims) in the Boolean environment. 2 adj. (Of a GATE) being able to
nor.
not- prefix. The positive, unswerving negation of the ensuing concept.
Compare NON-; UN-. See also HOLE.

~Babbage's memory boards relied on timber crosscuts with granular singularities

known as knot-holes. SubseQuent confusion when this techniaue was transferred to
slices of silicon led to the corruption not-holes.

noun adj. (esp. DP usage) any adjective. See also ADJECTIVE; NOUNS, MARCH
OF.

nouns, march of n. A string generated by the BNF production

<noun>: : <noun><noun> as in "group decision support system idea gen-
eration tool" and "software architecture engineering process domain analy-
sis." See also ADJECTIVE.

NT n. 1 Microsoft New Technology. 2 Competing religion New Testament. 3

Heresy Not There (attributed to Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems). 4 MYERS-
BRIGGS Type Indicator Rational (Intuitive Thinker).

null

nulls n. A null by another name ...

~Mike Rejsa claims that the Inuit have many names for snow,22 yet "here in
Minneapolis we know about snow, but that's all we call it. Why then, do I find myself
saying" ",",0, OL, '\0', NULL, (int *)0, 0 x 00, 0 x ‫סס‬OO, FALSE, etc.? Methinks
this is much ado about nothing ... "

null set n. & adj. 1 The (unique) set, written 0, with no members but with
the Zen power to generate endless koans, including the whole of mathemat-
ics. 2 adj. (Of a joke) also called Empty array. Largely propagated by
Edward M. CHERLIN, revered publisher of APL News.
~Following certain formal schema, the set 0 can be identified with zero. Next, the set
(0), containing only the null set, and, of course, itself far from null, can be taken as a

22. This and other Whorfian fibs are exoosed in Steven Pinker, T1u! LanRuaRe Instinct (Morrow,
1994).

147
null.bl.

template for the number I. One [sic] can then progress to (0, (0)) for 2, and so on,
to develop the so-called natural numbers and rule the world.
The provable equivalence of all null sets arrestingly implies that the set of all
Spanish songs lacking the word corazon is indistinguishable from the set of all soft-
ware packages that have never won a DP magazine Best Buy Award. Other notably
empty sets pleading nullo contendere include [sic] punctual Windows applications and
CEO's who resign in order not to pursue personal interests.
The non-empty set of null-set jokes is partly revealed by the following examples:

I. Q. Why is a mad dog like a tin of condensed milk?

A. Neither can ride a bike.

2. A person goes into a Moscow store:

"I hear you have no bread ...••
"Not so, I'm the butcher ... we have no meat; you want the baker next door; he's
the one with no bread."

3. "I would like a pie without the raspberries ...••

"Sorry, today we only have it without the strawberries ...••

4. Three condemned prisoners discussing their fate:

A: "I'm here for supporting Blavatsky ... "
B: "Funny .. J was arrested for opposing Blavatsky ...••
C: "I'm Blavatsky ...••

5. A: "Where are going?"

B: "Krak6w."
A: "My God, what a liar you are! You wanted me to think you were going to
l.6di., and you really are going to Krak6w!"

6. The San Francisco Muni mandates a refund if your scheduled bus is more
than 15 minutes late. However, no refund is available if the bus fails to
arrive at all.

nullable adj. (Of a relational database field) lacking the not-nullable flag.
~All the deep, unsolvable problems of ethics, logic, epistemology, and linguistics
converge on their bastard hybrid: relational database methodology. Experts and dab-
blers in this so-called discipline (distinguishable chiefly by how they pronounce SQL)
are forever locked in non-normalizable forms of combat long banned by the Geneva
Convention. Indeed, ROB disputation seems to have moved from crise to scandale.23
One of the problems is how best to stretch Boolean two-valued logic to cover real-
world categories such as "applicable but not yet known," "known but inapplicable,"
"applicable but unknowable," and "wait 'til Codd responds next month."

23. See, for example, David C. McGoveran, "Nothing from Nothing," Database Programming &
Design. December 1993. 'The switch to French is for deliciously dramatic effect. The long final
syllable of scanda/e is especially scandalous.

148
 numerology

null string n. " " See also MINISTRING; STRINGENT.

=> King Lear (Act I, scene 1):

Cordelia "", my lord.

Lear
Cordelia
Lear " " will come of" ": Speak again.

number cruncher n. 1 A heavy device for testing the compressibility of

numbers. The traditional method, pioneered by Control Data Corporation, is
to subject a sequence of numbers to progressively denser FORTRAN programs
until all 60 bits squeak. The more recent divide-and-conquer approach, by
Thinking Machines and others, puts the squeeze on a whole set of numbers
simultaneously. See also MASSIVELY PARALLEL.

numerolatry n. The unhealthy obsession with numbers and numerical pre-

cision; esp. the use of computers in the social sciences. See also INCH WORM;
-MANCY.

numerology n. The recreational branch of computer science.

=>Among the many deep CS theorems in the numerological environment, we cite:

I. The CDC 7600 is four times as powerful as the ICL 1900.

2. The computer in the film 200] was an IBM degrade:

(IBM III = HAL)

3. The English Electric LE03 was an upgrade of the KDN2:

(KDN2 + 111 = LE03)

4. Donald Knuth's renowned MIX was "the world's first polyunsaturated computer.
Like most machines, it has an identifying number-the 1009. This number was found
by taking 16 actual computers that are very similar to MIX and on which MIX can be
easily simulated, and then averaging their numbers with equal weight:

L(360 + 650 + 709 + 7070 + U3 + SS80 + 1107 + 1604 + 020 + B220 + S2000
=
+ 920 + 60 I + H800 + PDP4 + II)/16J 1009
The same number may also be obtained in a simpler way by taking Roman numerals"
(Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Fundamental Algorithms, vol.
I [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968]).

5. The Sperry Univac series 90 furnishes IBM series 360 performance with a 75 per-
cent cost reduction.

6. The language M is ten-times more powerful (or verbose?) than C. See MUMPS.

149
o
object n. & adj. & v. & whatever I n. Also called object code. [Latin obiec-
tatio "a reproach."] A formerly compacted but now expanded version of the
SOURCECODEgrudgingly produced by an ASSEMBLER or COMPILER. 2 n. [Latin
obicere, obiectum "to throw in the way of."] 00 More or less anything, usu.
much less; an essential but ill-defined marketing rubric. 3 n. c++ A CLASS
instance, usu. scope-ephemeral but sometimes PERSISTENCIZED by a missing
delete. 4 n. Pascal The Pascal object type, often shortened to object, is the
c++ equivalent of class, whence the C++ object, to avoid confusion, is the
Pascal object instance. 5 adj. (Of a technology) relating to any product with
the word "object" in its title; widely believed to be capable of speeding devel-
opment as each deadline is exceeded; according REUSABILITY a higher priori-
ty than USABILITY.6 adj. (Of a design METHODOLOGY) sensibly eschewing
abstract notions of fiscal-state-transitions in favor of meeting the payroll.
More at OBJECfWORSHIP; 00.
;::;)Object code is sometimes correctly referred to as "binary," but it is considered impo-
lite to call it "machine code" or "machine language" without first checking with the
machine. Buyers should also be aware of the possible ambiguity when offered a cheap
"price-no-object" compiler. Compare the "rust-free" car advert: $3,000 for the
car ... the rust is free.
Regarding the ubiquitous 00 objects, including those that are creeping up closet
than your convex rear-view mirror might indicate, the current marketing fashions and
wavering terminology defy satirical emblandishment.

object worship n. The oo-marketing landslide from reification to deifica·

tion. See also C++; CLASS;OBJECf.
Objectlve-C n. Also derog. Objectionable-C. A C-swept hybrid combining
the worst features of c++ and SMALLTALK.
More at TNHD.

obsolescence n. A system state determined exclusively by the manufactur-

er's MARKETING
department.
;::;)Users are strongly advised not to attempt this diagnosis unaided. Obsolescence
depends on many factors known only to the sales force-the cost prices and margins
on each model, whether all the available options have been added to meet the original
performance targets, the degree to which the user is locked in, and so on. In fact, the
user can be assured that the supplier and the supplier's competitors will be quick to
spot the first symptoms and will lose no time in bringing the matter to the DPM's atten-
tion. The news of impending obsolescence induces a menopausal shock in some users,
but there is really no rational basis for panic. Studies have shown that the onset of
obsolescence invariably coincides with the launching of a new and better system. The

150
 office UN only

angst of the user is soon swept away by the excitement of conversion and the challenge
of incompatibility.

OCR n. [Optical Character Recognition.] A method for misreading docu-

ments directly into a system without having to miskey the data first.

OCR A n. [So named because every character looks like an A.] A typeface
designed to be illegible to humans and unreadable by OCR scanners.

OCR B. n. An improvement on OCR A whereby human legibility is improved

at the expense of OCR scanner performance. Compare EI3B.

oedlpos complex n. [Blend of Oedipus + OS "operating system."] The

fears developed during the first 3 to 6 years' exposure to a domineering oper-
ating system, especially by the male user, that his algorithmic potency is
threatened by arbitrary job truncation. See also OSOPHOBIA.

OEM n. I [Obscure Equipment Methodology, or rare Original Equipment

Manufacturer.] 2 Alt. spelling ()M. A Hindu mantra in German-speaking
countries (Peter Kirwin).
=>The computer manufacturer has, from the genesis of the trade in the 1950s, faced
three major hazards: making computers, selling them, and effecting installation. The
OEM approach, evolved gradually during the natural struggle to reduce costs and
responsibilities, has virtually eliminated all three problems. Manufacturers no longer
make computers, but rather assemble each other's MODULES. The modules are in their
turn produced by obscure specialist companies from submodules provided by obscur-
er suppliers, and so on ad nauseam, through an infinitely parasitic hierarchy. Likewise,
the selling and installing chores have been increasingly delegated to systems houses,
software houses, and houses of mixed repute; consultants, both freelance and
respectable; and a variety of mail-order medicine persons, itinerant street vendors, and
friendly neighborhood haberdashers. Knitting this fine fly-by-night web together, and
tempting the user into the many-mansioned parlor of automation, is SNA (Scapegoat
Network Architecture). In the likely event of trouble, the end user simply removes the
five superimposed decals from each offending component, providing at least 20 defen-
dants for a dramatic REVERSED CLASS ACTION.

OEM cogs n. The main reason Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (ca.
1834) failed to perform to specification, and why his "mill did grind exceed-
ingly slow."

office use only n. A blank area left on TURNAROUND documents for subse-
quent OCR encoding should the LUDDITES fail to strike first.
=> There are two schools of thought on how best to discourage the great unwashed pub-
lic from defacing turnaround documents. The total failure of simple "00 not use this
space" warnings has persuaded some form designers to omit all such legends, while

151
Ogam

others have elected to provide a variety of "decoy" boxes with caveats calculated to
invite graffiti from the most staid recipient, but craftily protecting the real sacrosanct
areas. The growing complexity of actual and pseudo admonishments is illustrated by
the following example:

OCR area !!!!

We URGE you, PLEASE, not to DEFACE this space in any way!!!
H 0 N EST L Y this REALLY is IMP 0 R TAN T.
If you feel you must record telephone numbers, shopping lists or simply doo-
dle in this virgin area, PLEASE use only a soft pencil (2B or less) avoiding all
the characters listed overleaf. Whatever you do, PLEASE avoid the symbol.
OR ANYTHING REMOfELY LIKE IT. You've no idea the chaos this one
causes. Look, we know you hate computers. D'you think we like them? We're
just as much locked into the system as you are. So give us a break, man.
THANKS FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Ogam n. also called Ogham. \pronounced oom.\ ['The 'g' is silent unlike the
'p' in 'bucket'" (Dominic Behan).] An early (SOO B.C.E.) Celtic version of the
ASCn character set, designed for epigraphic efficiency but often observed on
CRT displays. See the illustration on p. 153.

OMG [Object Management Group.] A body formed, in vain, to control the

tsunami of unruly OBJECTS.

one-line patch n. [From D. C. Moulton, Ilford, Essex, England.] A KLUDGE

so minimal that no testing is necessary. Corrected by a further one-line PATCH.
See RECURSIVE.

online adj. 1 (Of a peripheral) denoting the rare, sublime, transient state of
being connected to a superior system. 2 (Of a user) relating to the period dur-
ing which unexpected credit-card charges accrue.

onomancy n. Divining FUNcrION from nomenclature. See also -MANCY;

NAMESPACE; NEWTON; TERMINOLOGY.

~Apart from the neological excesses of DP MARKETING, the onomancer is faced with
interpreting the volatile onomasticon of reused tokens. Thus, it is not immediately
obvious that Einstein and da Vinci are mundane e-mail packages, that MATISSE is an
00 database, that the Packard-Bell Force 2386 uses a 486 microprocessor, or that
Compel is an interactive software package. At the other end of termimological inex-

152
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Earty Ogam alphabets of Europe and North America. The oldest styles employ only consonants, and
appear to elate from around 800 B.C. onward. The developed Irish style, with vowels and the whole
range of consonants, appears only in monuments believed to postdate the time 01 Christ.

actitude, many users are tricked into believing that Microsoft's ACCESS provides a
ready entree to databases, and that WordPerfect is word-perfect.
00 [Object Orienteering] \initially pronounced oo! as in scooby-dooby-doo,
but now chiefly oh-oh as in oh-shit!\ n. The art (rare sport; science) of navi-
gating a class hierarchy armed only with a cheap compass and a small bag of
nuts. See also BROWSE; ENCAPSULATION; POLYMORPHISM; INHERITANCE.
~The roots of practical, computer-scientific 00 can be traced back to Simula-67.
Earlier philosophical inspirations come from Peirce, the father of SEMIOTICS:
"And he [Peirce] believed that objects are not substances-in-themselves, but are
constituted entirely by the laws which describe their behavior under all possible
conditions: this is the basis of his pragmatism." (Louis Menand's review of Joseph
Brant's Charles Sanders Peirce: A life [Indiana University Press] in the New York
Review of Books).

153
OOAL

OOAL [Object-Oriented Assembly Language.] A shock mock-proposal

intended to stem by ridicule the threatened flood of 00 extensions to BASIC,
COBOL, APL, Fortran, Jovial, Algol60, POP-2, and all known legacy lan-
guages.
~The attempt failed miserably. We now have ENIAC++, MercuryAutoCode-
WithClasses, and object-enhanced versions of Hartree's Differential Analyzer.

OOPS n. Either Acronym for Object-Oriented Programming System or (ono-

matopoeia) cry of annoyance following a mishap. Usu. both.
open adj. & v. trans. 1 adj. (Of a file) exposed, at risk. 2 adj. (Of a loop) end-
less; endowed with a loophole. 3 adj. (Of an os, PROTOCOL, API, file-fonnat, or
passing fancy) non-proprietary; freely disclosed except to stubborn rivals. 4 v.
trans. To render (a file) vulnerable to subsequent reads, writes, and kills; to
invoke the message "file does not exist" or "file already open."
~The spate of failed openings (Open Look, Open Desktop, X Open, ODAPI, OSP,
ODBC, Open City, Open Season, Open Sesame, Open Warfare. Open Book, Open
Weekdays Only, Open Drain, Open Parenthesis, Open Sore, Open-Toed Teeth, Open
Other End,24 and Open in the Name of the Law) comes as no surprise to free-market
economists and students of Old English. The former know that competitors, by defin-
ition, can never freely reveal their trade secrets. The latter know that the first recorded
open standard, reported in Aelric's Glossary (ca. 1000 CE), had collapsed by 1663: "As
useless as open-arses gathered green" (Thomas Killegrew's The parson's wedding).

operating system n. That part of the system that inhibits operation. Also
called os (from the clothing industry's abbreviation for outsize).
~In metacomputer science, great care is needed to distinguish: (I) the OS qua OS, (2)
the name of the OS, viz., < OS >, (3) what we call the name of the OS, viz., "< OS >,"
(4) what the OS calls itself, viz., ("< OS >"), and (5) what the OS calls when it calls
itself, viz., "<{"< OS >"»".

operator n. [Origin doubtful: possibly Italian opera "a long concatenation of

overdramatic, far-fetched, hysterical, and contradictory incidents," or, less
plausible: Latin opus "work."] The lowest, and least dispensible (archaic "dis-
pensable") link in the system's pecking order; the plankton in the DP food
chain. See PRECEDENCE.
~Spotters' Club hint: Look out for the ill-clad person reading the sports pages and
flicking cigarette ash in the card-reader hopper.

operators manual n. [IBM usage] A manual for the operator.

24. Slanderous rumor has it that this messaae is stamped on the base of all Guinness bonles sold
in Glasgow.

154
 osophobla

:::>The traditional absence of the apostrophe (operator's or operators') indicates that the
manual remains the property of IBM.

optimizer n. A compiler with three switches for controlling its object code
output: big, slow, and both. Compare PESSIMIZING COMPILER.

OR Overloaded abbrev. Operation Rescue; Organized Religion; Own

Recognizance; Operating Room; Oregon; Owners Risk; Operations Research.
Also Boolean operator; English conjunction. Warning Often resists contextu-
al disambiguation.

or v. trans. & adj. [Origin: English conj. or"" "alternative."] 1 v. trans. To dis-
junct (several binary victims) in the Boolean environment. 2 adj. (Of a GATE)
being able to or. Compare AND; NAND; NOR; XAND.

ORB [Object Request Broker.] "ORB is an honest broker-none more hon-

est, none more broke" (Dr. Joe Miller). See also OMG.

OS n. & adj. \pronounced oh-ess or oz.\ Possible abbreviation for OutSize or

OPERATING SYSTEM, or from French os "bone," as, "]' ai un os a gratter avec
vous."
OS/2 n. [TMIBM] 1 Formally One half of an os. 2 Informally An os that grabs
50 percent of your hard-disk, memory, and intellectual resources. See also
WARP.

:::>One of the most reassuring aspects of personal computing in the mid 1990s is that
you can run DOS under Windows under OS/2 under UNIX under $2,000.

OSI Abbrevs. for Open Systems Interconnection; Outside Special Interests.

Warning Not necessarily an overloading.

osophobla n. DP psychiatry The morbid fear of OPERATING SYSTEMS.

:::>A doctor writes: "Except in extreme cases, this condition should not give rise to
undue concern or bills exceeding $5000. There can be few nonnal persons who have
not, at one time or another, recoiled in horror when confronted with a 50 MB OS. I
know I have. DP Freudians have created their usual catchdollar theories to exploit the
gullible osophobic. They equate the monitor with some tyrannical father figure bent on
castrating both program and programmer, and bestow grotesque phallic tokens on such
innocent, mundane concepts as "input," "output," "RAM," "nesting," "multiple job
streams;' and "tirst-in-last-out." The ultimate folly in this verbose quackery was a
recent paper presented at a Jungian Institute seminar on "Spooling Dysfunctions and
the OEDlPOS COMPLEX;' which attempted to correlate instances of golf-ball printer fail-
ures with a symbolic (sic) increase in the male operator's anxiety state. As I indicated
earlier, there are, alas, extreme sufferers beyond the pale and budget of medical sci-
ence. We take them away from Print Manager as soon as we can, although little

155
oubliette

remains for them but a few twilight years in the Thumps Memorial Home for the
Recursively Bemused." See also ETHEl-RED OS.

oubliette n. (Origin: A medieval escape-proof, warden-free dungeon.) A

CACHE system with Alzheimer's Disease.

outsourced adj. 1 (Of a programmer) burnt out; unable to code. 2 (Of a pro-
ject) delegated to expensive scapegoats. See TURNKEY. Compare IN-HOUSE.

overcast adj. [Origin: possibly meteorological.] Related to a depressingly

nervous obsession with type-casting, esp. in Windows applications. See also
CAST.

~HPEN handlel, handle2;

if( HPEN(handle2) == HPEN(handlel) 1 { ••• }

overflow n. & v. trans. 1 n. A binary spillage. 2 v. trans. To exceed the capac-

ity (of a register, file, listener) in order to test the overflow indicator. 3 v. trans.
To produce more FLOWCHARTS than the site walls can support. See also BIT
BUCKET •

~ ••...Enough! no more:
"Your bits are dripping on the floor."
(The Duchess of Mal/oc)

overheads n.pl. 1 Conversation Metaremarks, richly laced with meta jargon,

helpfully aimed at deflating, eviscerating, decapitating, and pronouncing dead
any listeners reluctant to admit their obvious intellectual and experiential infe-
riority. 'This may be a little over your heads, but. ..•• 2 The expenses incurred
in producing the eponymous visual aids. 3 DP accounting For a given
installed and running system: the total cost of manufacturing, labor, compo-
nents, delivery, software support, service during the guarantee period, docu-
mentation, initial supplies (including the unbilled ribbon accidentally deliv-
ered with the line printer), sales commissions and expenses, and bribes.
overloading n. 1 Semantics Ganging up on a poor signifier until it collaps-
es from excessive signification. 2 OOP Assigning unlikely meanings to well-
known operators. Ideally, for maximum confusion, the overloading definitions
should be hidden. See also 11.A; NAMESPACE.

oxymoron n. The concatenation of m strings in an n-valued logic (1 <= m <=

n) where no two strings have the same true value.

~In the 2-valued logic endured by most readers (see BINARY), the oxymoron is a daily
fact of life:

156
 oxymoron

18b1e of Oxymoroos

operating system
PROG.RUN
delivery date
job satisfaction
last bug
final version
enhanced functionality
user friendly
supporting documentation
comprehensive package
management function
military intelligence
long-term benefit
backup copy
systems analysis
structured environment
benchmark results
run time
seamless integration
salesforce responsibility
SQL Link

157
p
package switching n. I The conversion, following threats of litigation,
from one set of pirated programs to another. 2 A cryptogrammic technique
that, rather than recoding characters in a message, achieves mystification by
directing arbitrary partitions of the message to random locations. See also
EPSS; PIRACY.

paging n. I Communications A panic call for the person who has just left the
site and is rushing to reach the nearest bar beyond the radius of the paging sys-
tem. 2 Software A VIRTUAL memory management system pioneered on the
Ferranti Atlas computer (1958) and rediscovered by IBM in 1976 in which the
system flicks or browses through numbered sections of mass storage (known
as pages) until one catches its fancy. As with Mr. Caxton's invention, there is
a high probability of accessing a few well-worn pages (known as the "dirty
bits").
~Irish Business Machines pioneered a hardware page location method (1980) called
MBT (Memory Board Tagging) whereby the comers of the memory boards are bent
over to speed a second access.

Le livre s'ouvre seul au feuillet souvent lu.

(E. Rostand, L'Aiglon)

pairs n. See TWINS.

pallndromlzatlon n. I Syntax The reversal of keywords to form block

delimiters. 2 Standards The formation of the ISO OSI committee. See also
AlBOHPHOBIA; IFF.

~Thus if statements can be terminated with II more prettily and economically than
with endif. Similarly, we meet pairs such as case-esac, for-rof, and wblle-elihw.
However end scores over nigeb for obvious reasons.

paper low n. A lamp that lights to indicate that your output is now appear-
ing on the PLATEN.

paradigm n. [Greek paradeigma "pattern, example."] I New Testament A

warning to others: "Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not will-
ing to make her a public example [paradigm], was minded to put her away
privily" (Matthew 1: 19 KJV). 2 Contrived acronym for PARAllel DIstributed
Global Memory. 3 A well-known cake mix. 4 Grammar Exemplary declen-
sion or conjugation, as in "zenbiltzan, zenbilkidazan, zenbilkiozan, zen-
bilkiguzan, zenbilkiezan." S Kuhnian (After Thomas S. Kuhn [1922-],
philosopher and historian of science) a dominant, orthodox scientific model,

158
 paradigm shift

fighting to maintain credibility and funding. 6 DP A PHATICISM. See also KUHN

BLUE BOOK; MONIST; PUN MORATORIUM.

~Since Kuhn's noble metaparadigmatic theory of Copernican, Newtonian,

Einsteinian, and Quantum mechanical models (introduced in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, 1962), "paradigm" has, alas, fallen among thieves. Thus, a PC
user writes:
"Coaxed by the magazines, I resolved to shift from the 386 to the 486 paradigm.
My local computer boutique proved more than anxious to help. I could not
believe my luck: they upgraded my system for $1500 and threw in the new par-
adigm at no extra charge. I'm still stuck with the old 4 MB-RAM and 2400-
baud modem paradigms, but who knows when that itch to shift will strike
again ...••
The current record for paradigmatic density (measured in swaines to honor the Dr.
Dobbs's columnist) belongs to Gerry Reid of IBM with 127 occurrences of "para-
digm" in a l3-page booklet boldly titled "Changing Perceptions: The Power of
Paradigms."
My long-fought crusade against overparadigmizationing suffered an apparent set-
back when my Mastering Turbo C (Sybex, 1988) appeared in a (modem) Greek trans-
lation. The front cover yelled epilegmena paradeigmata and several readers emailed
their tongue-in-cheek "tut-tuts." Of course, the Greeks, still use "paradigm" in its
Homeric, pre-Kuhnian sense. Epilegmena paradeigmata simply means "excellent
(code) examples."
I am not alone in urging paradigmatic caution. Sovietologist Robert Conquest
(Stanford University) is a founder member of the Society fo( the Abolition of Models,
Methodologies, Paradigms, and Parameters. He says, "All those who prefer the study
of complex realities to the simpler task of reifying formula or fantasy, please sign on."

paradigm shift n. DP Usage Any change in any direction. See PARADIGM.

~Thus, Ella Fitzgerald's old torch song "There'll Be Some Changes Made":
"There'll be a change in the weather, a change in the sea;
"From now on, there'll be a change in me;
"I'll change my way of walkin', my talk and my name;
"Nothin' about me will be quite the same;

"0 Lawd, there'll be some changes made today;

"There'll be some changes made'"
is now topically rendered as:
"There'll be a meteorological paradigm shift;
"Similarly, oceanographic and personal paradigm shifts;
"As of this memo, please note that paradigms are also to be shifted in the ambula-
tory, sociolinguistic, and onomastic environments;

159
parallel

"Indeed. the class of paradigmatically unshifted objects will soon be empty;

"0 Lawd, there'll be some paradigms shifted today! Hey, hey!

"There'll be some paradigm shifts! Yeah!"
Rumor suggests that the Motorola 68090 will provide the following instructions:
LSPR Dm,#n Logical Shift Paradigm Right-shift the paradigm in
register Om n places to the right.
LSPR Dm,Dn Logical Shift Paradigm Right-shift the paradigm in
register Om to the right by the number of places given in
register On (modulo a number I cannot reveal!)
LSPL Logical Shift Paradigm Left-operands as above
There are also four Arithmetical variants, ASPR, and so on. These shifts, and the asso-
ciated rotates, ROPR, ROPXR. etc., work in the obvious manner, that is to say. subject
to the usual quirks that make assembly languages so much fun. For example, paradigms
can only be shifted left an odd number of places on even days, and (to maintain orthog-
onality) vice versa. Careless shifting may lose significant bits of your paradigm. and in
the worst (best) case you could lose your paradigm completely. Depending on the size
and direction of the paradigm shift, the MC68090 can be made a CISC, MISC, or RISC
processor.

parallel n. & adj. 1 n. An unheeded warning; a disaster occurring elsewhere

but discounted by an unwise appeal to Euclid's fifth postulate; the woes of
others that remain at a constant distance, however prolonged. 2 adj. Being or
pertaining to everything happening at once. "When sorrows come, they come
not single spies, but in battalions" (Hamlet). See also MASSIVELY PARALLEL;
Compare SERIAL.

parentheses n. pl. (A (pair (of symbols (referred to as (open) and

(closed)))) each) of which) has the (hold (down) «to) (repeat) option) on a
«usp)-(oriented) keyboard».

parenthesis n. Archaic singular of PARENTHESES.

=>In most respectable languages, a singular, unmatched parenthesis is syntactically

inadmissible. Single "smart" brackets are now available that automatically generate
matching parentheses of the desired modality.

parity n. & adj. [From parrot "to repeat without understanding."] 1 n. A state
of bankruptcy achieved by installing the same computer system as your nearest
competitor's. 2 adj. (Of a check) able to detect an odd number of bit mutila-
tions but oblivious to the equally probable situation in which an even number
of bits get splayed.

160
 pment

Pascal manual n. Any book prefacially recommended by Ould Nick (Prof.

N. WIRTII).

=>By contrast, neither Ada (the Countess of Lovelace), nor Bjarne Stroustrup (the
Post-Count of C), has ever endorsed a book, written by others, on their associated lan-
guages.
password n. 1 High security Up to six of the initial characters of the user's
or the user's spouse's first name. 2 Top C4 security Up to six of the initial
characters of the user's dog's first name. 3 Paranoia The user's date of birth
or car registration number. 4 CIA The middle initials of assassinated U.S.
Presidents in reverse chronological order. This method meets the password-
update frequency regulations. S A widely known sesame that suddenly
becomes widely forgotten. 6 A device aimed at encouraging free and open
cooperation among the staff. 7 A string found only in Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary
of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words.
=>PeteVon, ex-hacker security consultant, writes from San Quentin:
"Memorable = pronounceable = vulnerable. So pick an obscure, alphanumeric,
unpronounceable, uncrackable, forgettable password ... and jot it down on your
mouse pad with a Sharpie indelible marker pen."
pastemic adj. [From Italian pasta, "paste, spaghetti."] Relating to the much-
maligned glue that holds your LEGACY code together. See also GOTO.

=>Post-structuralizing an old program is rather like restoring a vintage car: removing

the mud and rust leads to immediate disintegration.
patch n. & v. trans. [From JARGON ALE.] 1 n. A temporary addition to a piece
of code, usually as a quick and dirty remedy for an existing bug or misfeature.
A patch mayor may not work, and mayor may not be eventually incorporat-
ed permanently into the program. 2 v. trans. To insert a patch (into a piece of
code). See also ONE-LINE PATCH.
patent n. [Origin: Latin patens, -entis "clear, obvious," as in "patent non-
sense."] Software The exclusive right to trivial code, rewarding the first
claimant's effrontery. See also COMPTON EFFECT; LOnlS; PRODUCTIZATION.
=>The Platonist view that algorithms are "out there," God-given, awaiting discovery,
in contrast to the inventive, Edisonian bettering of mousetraps, is no longer relevant.
Even anti-litigious companies are being forced on the patenting bandwagon in order to
amass protective "trading cards." The fear is that a spreadsheet company "owning" 1-
2-3 might grab a patent on Peano's axioms, and gain a lien on Z+, the set of positive
integers. How this might clash with my own claim on the digits of 7t must be left to
some future, possibly innumerate judge and jury: "M'lud, exhibit A lists Lambert's
well-known proof of the irrationality of 7t. As you know, it was Lindemann who fur-

161
pause

ther demonstrated that 1t was also transcendental; let me take you to Lemma 3 ... " The
diseased state of affairs was unwittingly revealed by Jim Warren: "Patent litigation is
widely consumptive of financial and management resources ... " (MicroTlmes,
9n0/93) .
.
pause n. I A pleasant period of inactivity with unfortunate side effects called
DELAY. 2 A regular 5-second interval during which networks suspend opera-
tions to "allow local stations to identify themselves," after which regular exe-
cution is resumed.

payroll n. [From pay "emolument" + roll "to stagger, to perform a periodic

revolution.") I A computer run that allows you to see how much more your
colleagues are making and, in extreme cases, offers remedial action via dis-
creet program optimization. 2 The most vulnerable business application, and
therefore the first to be computerized.
~The vulnerability of an application is measured by the adverse impact of its output
on the recipients. Programs which output only to their case-hardened programmers can
be considered nonvulnerable. Those applications producing reports for top and middle
management can be rated 10 to 20 percent vulnerable, since such listings are mainly
cosmetic in character, and if they should accidentally trigger management decisions,
the vulnerability factor can quickly be lowered by more severe curtation of the report
heading legends and an oppressive increase in report output volume. Together, these
improvements restore the normal, harmless interdepartmental listings shuffle by
bemused managers, bring welcome overtime for the shredding-machine minders, and
provide a happy boost to the paper-salvage account.
Billing systems, on the other hand, carry a 50 to 70 percent vulnerability rating.
Suspicious, testy outsiders, known as customers, receive computerized invoices show-
ing wrong extensions for unordered items, mismatching statements, and prematurely
threatening letters.
Fortunately, most customers are equally computerized, and this reduces the human
involvement as the vendor's accounts receivable package clashes head on with the
vendee's accounts payable package.
The vulnerability of the billing system is also reduced by the physical separation of
the contenders, but no such lack of contiguity protects the poor payroll. The scurvy,
plebeian payee sweats and grunts within sight of the strutting, cossetted OP overlords
and their expensive artifacts. Payroll errors are no mere academic debating points. The
workers know their gross and net dues to the finest floating point, and are seldom pla-
cated by some bearded discourse on the misplaced GOSUB in line 4567 of the FICA
SICK OED routine. Also, perhaps to a greater extent than in any other computer appli-
cation, including intercontinental missile guidance, the payroll is ultra time-critical.
The minutest aberration in meeting the inexorable payroll deadline enrages the grasp-
ing employees. They will, at the drop of a W2, storm the computer room, armed with
distraught relatives and pellagrous children, creating a far from ideal environment for
the programmer who is trying to understand and incorporate the latest batch of changes

162
 PC UNIX

from the IRS. A revival of one of the many successful ancient systems of slavery seems
the only solution.

PC, pc Abbrev. piece; price; personal computer; politically correct; pullman

coach; police constable; privy council; privy councillor; post card; percent;
percentage; program counter; petty cash; past commander; post commander;
perpetual curate; post ciOOm; purified concentrate; pitch circle; price current;
prince consort; patricide; picocurie; pre-christian; plug compatible; printed
circuit; polychlorine; proto-croatian; positive crankcase; Pimms Cup; profes-
sional corporation; parity-charge; previous convictions; principal compound;
phencyclidine; Peace Corps. Warning Contextual disambiguation is not guar-
anteed.
~If we are forced to pick just one PC and discard the rest, there is no doubt that
Program Counter should prevail. 0 wonderful, process-sustaining register! Breathes
there a chip with soul so dead, that never to itself hath said, "Where's the next f**king
instruction?"

PC UNIX n. 1 A sub-$IOO subset of UNIX running on sub-CPUs. 2 A politi-

cally correct UNIX for the '90s.
~The net has been busy remapping UNIX command and utility names for our agen-
da-ridden sensitivities:

FascistIMacho Liberated
home (directory) squat
hangman dispenser_oCunjuscand3rueCpunishment
touch [command removed]
compress feather [this allows obsolete DeadWhite European Male
data to be archived via tar/feather.]
more enough [avoids the excesses of the Reagan years]
LaTeX KleeNeX [improved biodegradability]
kill euthanize
nice sue

[The nice command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves pri-
ority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be nice. In PC UNIX, the sue com-
mand is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privi-
leged ones.]

quota [Can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage,

and will be strictly enforced.]
abortO choiceO
rich text exploitive capitalist text
daemon spiritual guide, channels
dumb smart

163
PCMCIA

[All terminals are equally valuable and valued.)

normal video repressive video
(white foreground/color background)
reverse video progressive video
X-window PO 13-window

"For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of root and his wheel
oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration
functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organized
Systems (PC-DOS). No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be
'owned' by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decide how (or
whether) to respond to requests from users" (Anon. circulated by Peter Michaels at
wyse.com.).

PCMCIA See SARCONYM.

POA n. Personal Digital Assistant. See also SARCONYM; NEWfON.

=>What else to call these emerging palm-, wrist-, ankle-top computers? Some say PIM
(Personal Information Manager) which, at least to discriminating drinkers of specials,
has a pleasant taste ("More borage, dear?"). Hewlett-Packard, however, shows
appalling lack of taste and foresight by offering the MIA (Mobile Information
Appliance). Apart from the inept overloading (Missing In Action), "appliance" is sure-
ly one of the ugliest, least marketable words available. Appliances sweep, mow, clean,
juice, and break down.

POL n. 1 Page Description Language. 2 Program Description Language.

Warning Contextual disambiguation is guaranteed unless the program is
described on a single page.
peer group n. [From peer "observe closely" + (mathematics) group "a set
closed under a given operation."] All those stupid enough to claim equal sta-
tus and rash enough to pass judgment.
peer-peer network n. Also called peer-to-peer network. An anarchic
CLIENT/SERVER system in which servers refuse to serve and clients are forced
to help themselves.
pen adj. [From Latin paene "almost, not quite."] Related to the honest
acknowledgement that pen-computing, as implemented in Microsoft's Pen-
Windows and Apple's NEWfON, is not yet fully exploitable by mouse-hating
calligraphers. See also QUill.
=>Nathan Myers believes that the time is ripe to "hustle out and trademark all the pen-
words in the dictionary." He and Barry Dorrans suggest the following pen-based apps.

PenAlize Delete files not backed up

PenChant Choir attendance checklist

164
 personal computing

PenDragon Record minutes of meetings

PenGUln[ness] Beennaker's recipe manager
PenUltimate Seamlessly integrated application framework
PenUmbra Encrypt incriminating files
PenUry Charity avoidance excuse generator
PenDing General alarm clock
PenSive A thoughtful text filter
PenToad Amphibian breeding package
PenTaGram An e-mail thank-you note generator

Pentium n. A hot chip in every way, melting your mother's heart and board.
Intel's decision to replace faulty examples has been dubbed Repentium.

performance-enhancement n. Silicon technology The legal use of dope.

persistent adj. (Of an OBJECT) 1 Pesky; devious enough to escape the dread-
ed DESTRUCTOR. 2 Outliving its usefulness. See also E; MEMORY LEAK.

~Having shifted the paradigm to ooP, many are horrified to find that their objects have
feet of clay and are fleet of scope. The solution is "Persistencizing your libraries ... "
(C++ Report, March-April 1994).

personal computing n. A literally IN-HOUSE, DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYS-

TEM managed by the head of the household, who, singly, assumes the duties
of procurement committee, purchasing officer, DPM, SYSTEMS ANALYST, pro-
grammer. beta tester, data preparation department, field service engineer,
goods inward, and accounts payable. The role of END USER, LUDDITE, and JOBS'
COMFORTER are played, variously by the kids, spouse, and neighbors. Often
contrasted with IMPERSONAL COMPlJIlNG, where the users have no direct
involvement, enthusiasm, or responsibility.
~The growing success of personal computing is due to the users' lack offonnal com-
puter science expertise, the reduced need to delegate, and the freedom from artificial-
ly frenetic deadlines. Personal computing has replaced personal transportation, not
only in the number of magazines on the newstands, but as the topic of party small talk.
"What are you driving now?"
"Oh, I drive a pair of Helios-2 disks with a voice-coil device. Only 750K, but ter-
rific access time. I traded my cassettes in only last month... ."
"Really? I've just splashed out on a CDC Hawk, 10.6 marvelous megs, you know,
and a lot more than I really need, but the wife absolutely fell for that cartridge
blue... "
" ... and how is Melinda? Haven't seen her since that divine Palo Alto core swap... "
••...she's fine, but stubborn as ever. I can't get her to switch from Basic, would you

165
person-hour

believe? We had a simply disasttous evening last week; a combined Tupper and
software party ... she sold five dinner sets and three floppy disk holders ... but my
Snobol biorhythm dem went completely wild ... so embarrassing ....••

" ... those OP turkeys at the office, struggling along with an AS400; they used to pull
the wool over my eyes ... now they're all lining up outside my garage with their silly
little Fortran jobs ....••

person-hour n. A gender-free unit of work effort replacing the discredited

MAN-HOUR. A conversion factor of 1.50 should be applied. Also called labor-
hour.
~Anyone who has ever clocked on and off a real-time, minimum-wage job knows that
person-hours cannot be confused with precise physical units of sweat such as foot-
pounds. The latter fail to measure those essential, inttospective, loin-girding interludes
known as "sizing up the job," or "pondering the possibilities."
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month [Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1975, revised ] 982]) has famously revealed the paradoxes of "individual-
time" as applied to complex software projects. Thus, adding staff often delays com-
pletion, while extending deadlines can reduce code quality.

pesslmlzlng compiler [From JARGON FILE.] A compiler that produces

object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious translation.
Compare OPTIMIZER.

Phalstos, disk of n. See x, CURSE OF.

phase n. & v. trans. [From JARGON-FILE.] I (Of people) the phase of one's
waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. More at
TNHD.

~A person who is roughly ]2 hours out of phase is said to be "in night mode."
Changing one's phase can be effected in two ways; the "hard way" is to stay awake for
a long period, while the "easy way" is to stay asleep until the appropriate SHIfT is
attained.

2 (Of the moon) also called POM. A random parameter upon which something
is said, humorously, to depend, implying either the unreliability of whatever
is dependent, or that its reliability seems to be dependent on conditions still to
be determined, as: 'This feature depends on having the channel open in mum-
ble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon."
~However, a real POM factor has been reported: " ... this may be one of the few lec-
ture series scheduled around phases of the moon!" (Bubbles. Voids and Bumps in Time:
The New Cosmology, ed. James Cornell, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. ix). It
seems that four of the six speakers were "observational cosmologists" who had strict
POM-dependent viewing times pre-booked at various observatories.

]66
 piracy

3 v. trans. To declare, without warning, (a product or feature) to be mandato-

ry (phase in) or obsolete (phase out).
phatlclsm also called finer token. n. A phatic utterance, that is, one serving
some social purpose but completely devoid of informational content.
~Sociolinguists compare our "Let's do lunch soon," "Have a nice day," and "How are
the kids?" with the mutual grooming performed by "lower" primates. In DP discourse,
fashionable words and phrases, repeated with little regard to their original meaning (if
any), often assume a phatic disposition. See ARCHITECfURE; ENVIRONMENT; OBJECT;
PARADIGM; SYSTEM.

phatlc adj. See PHATICISM.

photon n. t A particle that if massless could throw some light on the dark
matter problem. 2 A leading agent in the VISUAL programming revolution.

PI/pit Confused mixture. 2 Greek pi. 3 Abbrev. positive integer (K. Iverson's
Jlanguage); politically incorrect; process interaction (GASP simulation lan-
guage); personal injury; principal investigator; private investigator; piaster;
Philippine Islands. Reader exercise Write a single, coherent sentence incor-
porating all these pi's.

pigeonhole n. & v. trans. [Origin: painful contraction of pigeon's hole.] t n.

An appropriate destination for most data, cheaper than sorting and limited in
capacity only by the size and courage of the pigeon. 2 v. trans. To cram (data,
documents, opinions) into a pigeonhole.
~This sadistic data-partitioning methodology was developed in England in the l850s,
jointly by the Common Carrier Pigeon Breeders' Association and the RSPB (the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Birds), at the request of the military, who were seeking
an improved communications technology to help resolve the Crimean stalemate. The
need to transmit dispatches too boring to fit the leg jacket of the average Columbus
label/arius simplexicus, and the increasing point-to-point distances to be covered as
the anti-Russian alliance eased its way to Sevastopol, invoked the breeding of several
large-ringed hybrids, the C. superanalidae, for example, and the delicate refinement of
in-flight package switching. The instructive experimental errors of that period still sur-
vive in current DP jargon. One particularly decimating link in the DARPA network is
reverentially known as the "valley of death," and users often say they "get a charge"
from certain protocolic idiosyncrasies which lead to fatal transmission errors.

pilot adj. [Named to honor Amelia Earhardt.] (Of a scheme) doomed; waste-
ful; thrown away; lacking SCALABILITY.

piracy n. t General "Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made

it." (Ambrose Bierce). 2 Asia & ex-Soviet Union lYping DISKCOPY and
INSTALL.

167
plxe'

~Confucius say, "Enjoy software in the piracy of your own home."

pixel n. [Portmanteau: picture element.] A pointillistic approach to screen

graphics whereby I SEURAT =
4 pixels; I SMYOOE =
4 SEURATS; I BLYB 4 =
smydges, etc. The anti-pixel lobby is promoted in Jaggies, Their Cause and
Cure, issued by the Vector Display League. See also BITMAP.

platen n. A supplementary print spooling device which can retain, typically,

20 lines of print in the absence of paper.
~A Platenist engineer writes: "The effectiveness of your platen as an emergency print
buffer is much improved by regularly cleaning it with a soft, damp rag. The proper fre-
quency will depend on the alertness of your paper-feeding staff and the sensitivity of
the PAPER-LOW warning system. Note that printing on the platen is cumulative, rather
than c1ear-before-write. If more than, say, three buffer cycles occur before the nonpa-
per situation is detected, the chances of recovery are rather slight. A notable exception
was the painstaking study of ST. PRESPER'S ancient IBM typewriter-the famous deci-
pherment of the Dead-C platen-which miraculously recovered most of that ancient-
minded anchorite's unpublished scriptures.
The suggestion that platens and printer ribbons should be of contrasting colors is
being actively debated by 28 of the affected standards committees.

platform n. [Origin: the railroad "nexus of unpunctuality," or political

"grounding of dishonesty," or both.] DP Usage Largely, a synonym for the
phatic ARCHlTECTURE, ENVIRONMENT, and SYSTEM. See also PRODUCTIZATION.
~Care is needed with the available prepositions. Note the following patterns:

Running in [under] the DOS environment

Operating on (from] a DOS platform

An interesting exception is "Running from an OS/2 platform" in the sense of away

from.
With the growing association of "environment" with PC slug-hugging, tree-spiking,
green New Agers, "platform" is now preferred in many quarters. (The Oregon anti-
ecology lobby, for example, has spawned bumper stickers: "When paper products dis-
appear, you can always wipe your ass on a spotted-ow1.")
Certainly, "platform" does have a nostalgic macho ambience, starting with school-
boy steam-train spotting at Lime Street, Maggie May and stale buns. Moving, later, to
Paris-Warszawa Wagons-Uts, Zubrowkas, diamond earrings, twisted stems of
papirosi, sables, dark-tune led mistresses, ...

plotter n. The device or person after your job.

poaching n. Marketing The stochastic enlargement of a prospect set in order

to solve certain fonnulations of the TRAVELING SALESPERSON PROBLEM.

168
 polymorphism

~In lenient 19th-century England, poachers were given a free cruise to Van Diemen's
Land; in the harsher commercial climate of today, poachers find themselves transport-
ed to hellish weekend Quota-makers' Conventions in Cleveland.

polntee n. That, if anything, pointed at by a POINTER. See also THIS.

~Ignoring Queen Victoria's prophetic warning, "It's rude to point," many computer
languages offer data types such as "pointer to data type T" where T itself can be a
pointer type. Thus, pointees may well be pointers, yea even unto themselves. A point-
er can be interpreted as the memory ADDRESS of its pointee (the putative object resid-
ing at that place in memory). The devout hope, a sort of computer-scientific Calvinism,
is that pointer and pointee values maintain this preordained relationship throughout the
manifest volatilities that RAM and code are heir to. A symptom of widespread point-
er paranoia is the fact that in C1C++, for example, zero-valued (or NULL) pointers are
non-grata; they point nowhere, have no pointees, and noisily resist dereferencing.
There is a growing backlash from the parsimonious who resent the fact that a perfect-
ly respectable, physical byte at address 0 is pointlessly ghettoed.

pointer n. An expression evaluating to the address of the most vulnerable

part of your KERNEL. See also DEREFERENCE; INDIRECTION; POINTEE; REFER-
ENCE.

~ Whence the wise old blessing: "Mayall your pointers be NULL."

Polish camera n. Shoot'n'point. See also ETHNOLOGY.

Polish mouse n. Drop'n'drag. See also ETHNOLOGY.

Polish notation n. [Latin politus "refined, elegant."] A notation for those

unable to pronounce Lukasiewicz, but anxious to pay homage to his native
land.
~Sometimes (vulg.) spoken of as Okie notation, English notation, Papist notation, and
so on, depending upon the local subculture andlor the courage of the speaker. See also
E11fNOLOOY.

poll n. A set of unloaded questions scientifically constructed to elicit an unbi-

ased response, e.g., "Given the high unemployment rate and soaring inflation,
would you vote for that bastard Carter again?"
~A similar polling strategy is often employed by the os to test the gullibility of
diverse computer resources.

polymorphism n. Two of the seven pillars of OBJECT ORIENTEERING. The

other five are ENCAPSULATION, INHERITANCE, and BRADY GOOCH. See also BIND-
ING TIME; OVERRIDE.

~I have an agreement with GOOF, the Guild of Object-Oriented Formalists, not to

reveal the etymology of "polymorphism" or explain "pure virtual function" in any
book costing less than $39.95. Sorry.

169
POM

POM n. \pronounced P-O-M or porn (esp. Australian)\ [Acronym for Phase

Of the Moon.] Chiefly, as "POM-dependent," flaky, unreliable. See also
PHASE. More at TNHD.

POOP adj. [Acronym for Post-oop] (Of a PARADIGM) long-awaited by many.

Also, reminiscent of the sound made by the collapse of an overinflated bal-
loon.
=>OOP is what President Bush called "The ... er ... Object thing," while "Post" is the
trendy lookahead prefix, not to be confused with a POSTFIX. Likewise, do not mistake
the prefix for Emily the logician. Editors should therefore note the difference between
"post-Church" and "Post-Church" (not too easy at the start of a sentence). The ultimate
teaser is "post-modernism" which seems to be chasing, but is unable to catch, our mov-
ing "now."
Alan C. Kay, Senior Fellow at Apple, has predicted a post-app, post-OOP, post-
everything paradise: "The future will also bring transitions to end user application
development, object-oriented programming (OOP), and computer simulation ....••
(Computer Currents 9, no. 23 [April 21, 1992], p. 10).

portable adj. (Of a program) able to CRASH any OS on any PLATFORM.

Compare MACHINE-INDEPENDENT; VENDOR-INDEPENDENT. See also C; UNIX.

POSIX [Presumed recursive acronym for POSix Is not uniX.] A large and
growing number of metaUNIX standards subcommittees conferring POSIX-
compliancy (also called posicity) on otherwise incompatible systems.

postfix NOT n. The assertion of a proposition immediately followed by its

denial. See also MONOTONIC.
=>The postpended, vitiating negative is widely attested in diverse languages but the
semantics vary. "She loves me not" is simply a poetic "She does not love me," not to
be confused with the sardonic, "She loves me. Not!" The French subtitles for the
movie Wayne's World translated this final "Not!" as "Th paries!" ("sez you!") which
misses the point. We need to negate our own rather than the just-previous proposition.
A final "Pas!" might work. Although it's not "proper" French, you could argue that the
affixed "Not!" is not "proper" English. Pierre Brasseur in Les enfants du paradis was
fond of saying "Absolument pas!" but that phrase confirms his previous negative state-
ment. The rhetorical "n'est-ce pas?" (lit. "is this not?") simply queries the preceding
statement. The English equivalents are "isn't it?" "aren't they?" "doesn't heT' and so
on depending on the format of the statement. However, Besicovitch, the Armenian
topologist, used "isn't it?" regardless of the Queen's rules: "Let R be the real numbers,
isn't it?" Interestingly, the Cockney "init?" follows the same usage. If you ask for
directions in London, you might be told, "Thrn right gov, initT' According to my friend
Lill Adolfsen, Norwegians have always been inclined to tag "ikke sandt" (lit. "not
truth ••) at the end of an affirmation, so, ironically, it might not be the best way of con-
veying in Norwegian the shock effect of Wayne's slang.

170
 prayer

The postfix Nor is reflected in the new C syntax:

if (x == y!) {

power adj. (Of a user) gullible; keeping up with the lobs's; willing to pay a
premium to be frrst on the block.

PPN n. \pronounced pippin, pee-pee-en, or pay-pay-en\ Abbrev. Project

Programmer Number (DEC, Alphamicro, etc.); Peer-Peer Network; or French
"Passera Pas la Nuit" (i.e., close to death). Warning Often resists contextual
disambiguation.

prayer n. A low-cost method of data verification, the efficiency of which

depends on the intensity, sincerity, and accuracy of the supplicant, and on the
mood of the Beseeched. Compare OOXOLOGY.
~A DP theologician writes: "In the early 1950s, input to the EDSAC I at Cambridge
University, England, was punched on blind (no hard copy) five-channel CREED paper-
tape perforators. Try telling that to this year's graduates, already complaining of the
limitations of ANSI C's wide char ... they just won't believe you. The LAW OF VOLTAIRE-
CANDIDE was some consolation, insofar as 5 channels offered only 32 code combina-
tions, which greatly reduced the chance of error. The old figs/Jetters trick increased the
repertoire to 58 codes or so, still far below what the ASCII-pampered kids of today
take for granted. In the absence of paper-tape verifiers, the prayer method of verifica-
tion was devised and used even by the Marxian majority. It was widely argued that IF
God existed, He or She would be a Cantabrigian, ELSE Lenin might be listening,
ELSE only a few minutes in the long input cycle would be lost in any event. The choic-
es of Deity and timing (for maximum receptivity) were subject to many informal
benchmarks. Needham's successes seemed to favor the standard Church of England
Trinity, Whose lines were busy only during a few peak Sunday festivals. Composite
entreaties to mixed lists of pre-, pro-, and post-Christian gods were the least effective,
supporting the impression that Omnipotents are a jealous lot. Those wishing to take up
the prayer method of verification are strongly advised to pick one One, forsake the rest,
truly believe, and shun apostasy. Two thoroughly tested specimen prayers follow.
Substitute your preferred values for the God-string variables X. Y. and Z, and feel free
to vary the degree of obsequiousness according to your personal tastes."

Prayer A:-(X should have a Christian-type value.)

"0 dearly beloved yet frightful X, cast Thou Thine penetrating glance upon these our
codes and data, and grant them, 0 X, Thy powerful chastising and corrective method-
ologies, for there is no good in them; for we have entered the fields we ought to have
skipped, and we have skipped the fields we ought to have entered, yea with null in our
hearts. 0 X, before Whom all systems tremble, forgive, we beseech Thee, the manifold
trivialities of our appointed tasks, but nonetheless guide them safely through our Vale
of Tears Mk.I, that our output may glorify Thy ineffable name. Finally, 0 X, if Thou
hast a free moment, we beg Thee, before we submit this unworthy disk unto Thy sta-

171
precedence

bilizing mercy, that Thou mightst quickly review our latest C++ compiler, many fea-
tures of which find Thy children sorely tried, yea even untried. For what we sowed in
haste, reap we now in endless patches. Fix Thou, we pray, our bountiful oversights,
that we might lift up our overall performance, whence cometh our income. In particu-
lar, we pray, seest if Thou canst correct the sinful bug in the exception-handling rou-
tine [substitute your current problem here). And all this we ask in Thy name, as
ordained in Thy many exciting newsletters. Amen."

Prayer 8-(Set X to any suitable male Greek value in the Olympian environment, and
let Y = a mother of a wife of X.)

"Brave, wise, openeyed X; yes, you who rescued Zilicon unchipped from the dull-
brown earth, snatched Taenia and Papyros from the river's edge. Kind regards to your
wives and families!
"It's some time since we enlisted your help. Too long, unaided, have we engaged
in perilous, uncharted programs, and stormtossed standby'd voyages, plagued with
Tyche's taunts, while encoding the extant sagas of your forgotten followers and trans-
lating them into contemporary English. Are we reaching you, allhearing X? Show us a
sign! A thunderbolt to smite our unreliable Oracle [substitute Sybase, OB2, Ingres,
etc.) would not displease some sections of this camp. Nor would we object to the
immediate destruction of our rivals, who strut and prosper within the shadow of our
spears. The ships charged with our nightwatch relief languish on a distant bay. Three
and thrice three shifts have sleepless passed since first we went on-line. Our 10, once
so fair, is a complete cow, and we suspect that the branchtongued Y is compounding
our woes! Clearsighted X, guide this reel of entrail, freshly plucked, which we reluc-
tantly fling at our sleeping seers."

precedence n. 1 DP sociology The natural, calvinistically ordained pecking

order, as

Systems analysts and your ladies,

Consultants and your lovers,
PRs and your roommates,
Salesmen and your bits on the side,
Programmers and your wives,
Operators and your women,
Methodologists and your singular methodologies,
Be upstanding and raise your glasses!
Preab son 61!
I give you Multiculturism, Open Systems, Free Enterprise, Gender
Equality, and Microsoft!
(Anonymous Computer Society Toastmaster)

2 Mathematics Arbitrary (also maddening) rules allowing the evaluation of

2 + 3 x 6 I 49 X I

172
 prlcefpertonnence

and similar puzzles.

~It's always a good idea to follow the precedence and associativity rules prevailing in
your particular language, and, in any case, "parenthesize, parenthesize ... " However,
note that the subexpression evaluation order is often IMPLEMENfATION-DEPENDENf.

prefix notation n. Reversed SHILOP notation.

prepend v. [Originally, "to consider or premeditate."] DP usage By analogy

with "append" and "postpend," 10 attach in front of.

Prescribe, prescribe n. & v. 1 n. Kyocera's post-Postscript POL. Z v.

Linguistics To ordain; to piss me off; to piss off me; to off piss me; to piss off
Steven Pinker and other descriptionists.
~A perplexed Laserite writes: "My Kyocera Laser printer offers HP Laser emula-
tion-which in turn offers Kyocera emulation. Self-immolation? Kyocera supports a
PDL called Prescribe. Prescribe commands are embedded in your normal text by the
prefix sequence I R I and are terminated by the string EXIT. It is reasonably assumed
that I R I and EXIT will not be encountered during a normal burst of text. How, pray,
can you list Prescribe programs that, obviously, contain I R I sequences? Well, you
have the SCRC (Set Command Recognition Character) command that allows you to
change the R to, say, an L:

IRI SCRC L; EXIT;

Thereafter, IL I acts as the command prefix, leaving you free to print I R I as a normal
string. To restore I R I as the command prefix, you need the command

ILl RES; EXIT;

But, the Kyocera manual (claimed to have been printed on its subject device), lists
these "expanded" programs, containing both I R I and I L I sequences. I suspect that
they have another level of SCRC behind the scenes-and I intend to ask them for a list-
ing ...••

prestidigitation n. [Latin praestigiator "conjuror, magician" + digit.] 1 The

assignment of mystical, quasi-numbers to the IEEE floating-point menagerie.
Z The amazing "now-you-see-it, oops" trick performed on a STACK. 3 The
mapping of hopefully distinctive numerical values to non-numerical database
fields, e.g., the NULL field in Borland's Paradox.

price/performance n. Marketing A ratio usually non-computable since the

numerator is subject to random discounts and the denominator vanishingly
small. See also $CAll. Compare LEARNING CURVE.
~To avoid singularities, some writers quietly invert the fraction: " ... she purchased at
the low end of the price/performance scale, deciding to move up if her needs changed"
(USAir in-flight magazine, spotted by Michael J. Zehr).

173
prime rate

prime rate n. A monotonic increasing sequence of interest percentages

devised by bankers to discourage, gently but firmly, the greed of their clients.
The rates follow the well-known series: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, ... , and it is
conjectured that, in the endless struggle to combat inflation, the prime-rate
increment need not exceed 2 points on an infinite number of opportunities.

printer n. The weak-link of DP technology and our main hope for a paper-
less society.

prlntf n. One of several related, dauntingly complex input/output formatting

functions specified in the ANSI C library together with Dr. Kevorkian's hot-
line number.
=>The printf family is the chief reason for the widespread acceptance of C++, even
among those who hate iostream classes.

proctologist n. [From the Greek proktos "rectum" + logos "word."] One

who is involved in, or intrigued by, the output problem.

productlzatlon n. 1 Verbose production, hinting at possible gaps between

concept, announcement, and availability. See also CAD. 2 The growing ten-
dency to reify intangibles.
=>Thus the promises of insurance companies and brokers are now "products," the cere-
bral act of programming is a branch of engineering, the os is a PLATFORM, a set of data-
base routines is an Engine. and everything is an OBJECT'. See also PATENT; SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING.

program n. & v. 1n. A PROGRAMME written in a lower-level language, such

as American English. 2 n. A sequence of detectable and undetectable errors
aimed at coaxing some form of response from the system. 3 v. trans. To match
(a problem) with the least inappropriate COMPUTIBLE function. See also COM-
PUTABLE. 4 v. intrans. To write programs with no particular object in mind. See
HEURISTICS.

=>Programs are graded according to the response elicited.

ProRram Grade Response

A Rejection with diagnostics

B Rejection-no reason given

C Total indifference

114
 progf8mmer

Recent rumors that ISO is mooting a grade A+ for programs which evoke parts of the
desired output were greeted with good-natured derision by the programming commu-
nity. A spokesperson for the IUP (International Union of Programmers) declared that
"this unwarrranted arousal of our employers' expectations will unconditionally incre-
ment the invidiousness of our members, already grappling with badly defined prob-
lems under adverse VAPORWARE environments. Brothers and sisters, this new grading
puts us all on the thin slope of a most slippery wedge!" The cheering delegates then
spontaneously took up Chant #215 from the IUP Hymnal:

Hey, hey, Thomas 1.,

How many files did ya lose today?
Bricks without straw, that's OK;
Bricks without clay,
No way!!!

programanla n. An incurable type of megalomania in which the sufferer,

possessed of demoniac stamina and oblivious to budgetary constraints,
attempts to prove that all problems can be solved by computer.
A DP doctor writes:

~"The Thumps Memorial Home for the Recursively Bemused (Stockport, England)
reports that 90 percent of its cubicles are now occupied by irremediable programani-
acs. The Home's 370/168 is well beyond the nonnal three shift saturation point, but the
inmates appear to be willing to accept almost any TSO indignity in their futile search
for the universal algorithm. 'They are all model patients,' quipped Home Director Dr.
Hennes, 'and God knows you need patience with the model we bought.'
"My own practice handles mainly academic sufferers on an out-patient basis. These
sad cases have exhausted their campus budgets, and many drift into a life of crime:
forging account numbers, stealing passwords, burning down flREWALLS, panhandling
the computer allocation committee- 'Can you spare a time slice and a couple of K?
Look, man, I ain't had a decent run all week'-raiding Byte Shops, freaking Telenet,
and so on. There isn't a lot I can do. If I try to wean them off DP with some old-fash-
ioned basket weaving, they immediately want to automate the basket weaving with
some grandiose occupational therapy package. And, since I started putting my appoint-
ments and billing on the computer, I find I can spare less and less time with my
patients .... "

programme n. A PROGRAM written under the influence of traditions ranging

from Chaucer to Cartland.
~"I say, I say, what's the difference between a programme and a cricket innings? The
innings ends with a declaration!" (Henny Thumpman).

programmer n. lOne who claims or appears to be engaged in the perpetra-

tion of programs. 2 The systems analyst's diplomatic attache at the alien court
of the cpu. 3 One engaged in a practical, nonsystematic study of the halting

175
progl'8mmlng

problem. 4 "A harmless drudge" (Lord Bowden, 1953).

programming n. (1994-) The dragging'n'dropping of reusable WIDGETS.

=>At least the adverts for VISUAL programming and 00 application frameworks tell us
that "no lines of code need to be written." It is hard to believe that the old syntax-grunt
can survive when the OUI AppBuilder methods are so muchjUn.

Prolog n. Officially from PROgrammation en LOGique (Alain Colmerauer

and Philippe Roussel, Marseilles, 1972) but some say the language was thus
named as a Gallic ploy to gain first place in this dictionary (suggested by Alan
Zeichick, editor OS/2 Magazine). "Foiled again, my Froggy friends ... " (Duke
of Wellington). See also NEGATION-AS-FAILURE.

promotion n. 1 Staff Reassignment to a higher level of incompetence. 2 C

also known as The Numerical Analyst's Dream. The silent, automatic con-
version of a value to one of higher precision. See also CAST; DATA TYPING,
DEMOTION.

prompt n. 1A delayed message from the system demanding an immediate

response from the user. 2 UNIX A symbol on the screen indicating which
SHELL is attacking you.

=>Traditionally, the two main UNIX shell contenders have been Steve Bourne's origi-
nal east-coast AT&T-Bell Labs BOURNE SHELL (with a $ prompt) and Bill Joy's upstart
west-coast UCB C shell (with a % prompt). The ecumenical Korn shell has failed to
spoil the fun by offering a synthesis spumed by both sets of diehard belligerents.
Semioticians have pondered the deep significance of these prompt characters: the
brazen, hard-nosed, New Jersey "dollar" versus the liberal, Californian-campus,
thanks-for-sharing "per cent:' However, note that both shells let you change, and even
interchange, their DEFAULT prompts. K1BI17ERS may well snigger at the % on your
screen, but you could be sneakily enjoying the Bourne shell (and vice versa). Running
counter to the parsimonious UNIX tradition are those who set their shell prompts to
"0 Master, I await your next command with exponentially increasing anticipation: ".

proposal n. 1 Staff relations A suggestion aimed at reducing third-shift

ennui, also called sexual harassment. 2 Language standards Stage minus-
aleph-O in the fight for recognition. 3 Marketing A standard set of binders sub-
mitted by the vendor to the vendee (prospect) in which the first page of vol·
ume I is personalized with the prospect's name and the last page of volume III
is personalized with a flexible quotation. See also PROPOSAL EVALUATION.

proposal evaluation n. 1Staff relations The slight pause between PROPOS-

AL and acceptance. 2 Language Standards A study of the brittleness of exist-
ing code. 3 Marketing The weighing of manufacturers' proposals by the
prospect.

176
 PSI

=:>Conventional postal scales will cope with all but the most outrageous marketing pro-
posals. The Horchow catalog, however, does offer an up-market proposal evaluator in
polished brass with logarithmic scale handling multivolume proposals in a single pass.
After weighing each proposal, the next step is to compute the ratio (Total net $ quota-
tion)/(weight of proposal in pounds). The four bidders with the lowest ratios are then
informed that they are in the short list of three. Current ISO standards allow from one
(minimum) to seven (maximum) proposers to be admitted to the "short list of three,"
but experience indicates that nominating four, if possible, ensures continued goodwill
and dilutes any accusation of bias. Further pruning of the short list is best left to the
infallible and ineffable free-market forces and nepotism.

proprietary adj. [From Latin proprius "owned."] Firm; reliable; supported.

Compare OPEN.

=:>Beware of the false dichotomy between evillproprietarynocked-in and

good/open/fancy-free. Whom, indeed, can you sue or reward when your spouse dies
from generic medications?

proprietary caveat n. [From "proprietary" + Latin caveat "let himlher

beware," whence = "let the owner beware."] Software The quasi-legalistic
warnings prepended to unbundled programs, which, like the Ten
Commandments, serve as the sinner's vade mecum.
=:>Software caveats, ideally, should be limited to 10 percent of the total source code,
but the experienced user expects all worthwhile piratical opportunities to be included.

proSpect n. [Latin prospectare "to look forth upon."] lOne of the real vis-
itational targets in the TRAVELING SALESPERSON PROBLEM. 2 A company or
individual temporarily unable to contact a reference account. 3 Anyone who
circles a number on a magazine reader service card. Compare INTROSPECr;
SUSPECr.

protocol n. A set of conventions intended to ease communication between

diplomatic, consenting devices.
=:>Unfortunately, LAYERING is the ruling-but-self-defeating fashion, and a protocol with
less than seven layers cannot be taken seriously. The resulting problems of trans-layer
communication remain unsolved.

prototyplng n. Mandatory usage: rapid prototyping. The speedy creation

of THROW-AWAY programs. See also VERSION.
=:>Eventually, depending on the DEADLINE and other distractions, the creation rate
exceeds the rejection rate, leaving a surplus of code available for the IMPLEMENTATION.

PSI Overloaded abbrev.: Pounds/square inch; Political Stress Index (Prof.

Jack A. Goldstine, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies). Warning Often
resists contextual disambiguation.

177
PTF

PTF n. [Permanent Temporary Fix, or rarely Program Temporary Fix.] Any

programming action taken to bypass software errors reported by the USER.
~Program Temporary Fix was an early IBM euphemism for a PATCH.Any PTF that
offers immediate mollification of the bug or misfeature stands a good chance of being
incorporated into the definitive system corpus. Subsequent side effects can be blamed
on the original error.

pun moratorium n. The doomed campaign to deoxymoronize computer

humor.
~In particular, the vain attempt to demonstrate that plays on words such as RISCand
UNIXare unfunny if the player is unaware of their historically built-in playfulness.
Other puns assinorum deserving a well-earned retirement relate PARADIGM, Paradise,
and ten cents in boringly obvious ways: "Paradigms Lost and Regained," "Brother, can
you s'paradigm?" and so on. Likewise, the cash/CACHE thing is surely bankrupt:
"Cache-only memory, no checks." Be assured, too, that every known C homophone has
had its weary, C-sick day at the C-Users Journal's annnual C-pun contest: C-through
UNIX, C'est C Bon, Holy C, Proficient C, Vitamin C, 0 say can you C? e = mC2,
Variations in C, C-C Rider, Rauchen C?, The Cruel C from Cmantec, Mer-C
Beaucoup ... ad nau-C-am.
One of Western Democracy's major flaws is that we cannot, without pettifogging
legal interference, publicly hang, draw, and quarter C-punsters.

punch n. & v. trans. 1 n. A device used to reduce the weight of a card or

paper tape in order to minimize postal charges. The CHADIC by-products have
proved to be a useful and persistent confetto. 2 v. trans. To expose (a card or
paper tape) to the whims of a perforator or perforatrice.

push n. & v. trans. 1 n. "One of two things mainly conducive to success,

especially in politics. The other is Pull" (Ambrose Bierce). 2 v. trans. As in
pushing one's luck: to subject (data) to the vagaries of a STACK pointer. See
also LIFO.
~The dangers are often recursively magnified when SP (the stack pointer) is itself
pushed on the stack.

178
Q
QA 1 Question! Answer. 2 Quality Assurance: the department charged with
the unenviable task of "getting the f***ing product out of the f***ing door by
five f***ing thirty."
~The overload may relate to bygone days when Quality Assurance passed bug queries
back to the offending programmer.

QlP n. [Query Language Processor (© Sperry Univac).] A compiler that

allows the nonprogrammer to generate a QUERY PROGRAM. See also SQL.

query program n. A program that, for all input strings X, responds with the
message ?X?

queue n. (Brit.) An orderly line of zero or more persons or jobs.

Quill n. A logic programming language from Prime Arithmetics, San
Francisco, Calif.
~1be name could trigger giggles in view of the current spate of PEN systems. Recall
the cynical reaction to ICL's 1900 range of mainframes: "Is that A.D. or B.c.1"

qUOtes n. pl. A pair "of' obfuscating "symbols" casting "doubt" on "the"

enclosed ''textual intentions." See also DISQUOTATIONAL; METACHARACI'ER.
~The "quotational escape" is a difficult habit to break. There we go again. It carries
over into body language where we now vibrate two fingers "from" each upraised hand
to indicate that the accompanying spoken element is not to be taken, dare we say, "lit-
erally." I see Terry Eagleton on his deathbed saying "I did my [open weak twin-finger
squiggle] best [end weak twin-finger squiggle] ... "

179
R
-ready suffix 1 Available now at extra cost, as in "monitor-ready," "RAM-
ready." 2 Available at some future date for an unspecified cost, as in "Al-
ready." Compare -AWARE.
R&S The New Hacker's Dictionary (TNHD), named for the authors, Eric S.
Raymond and Guy L. Steele Jr. Compare K&R.

R1 n. The original name for John McDermott's Xcon expert system (1980),
arising from the old joke: '''Three years ago I didn't know what a knowledge
engineer was. Now I Rl."
RAM 1 Major Hindu deity. 2 Revised Ancient Model (as in Martin Bernal's
"Black Athena.") 3 Random Access Memory. Overload Caution: Often
beyond contextual disambiguation:
=:>Cries of "Jai Shri RAM!" ("Hail Lord RAM!") were heard recently during the raid
on the Babri Mosque (reputedly built over RAM's birthplace in Ayodhya). Equally fer-
vent affirmations have been reported at Fry's Electronics during an OS/2 promotioll
sale.
,
random adj. 1 (Of a number generator) predictable. 2 (Of an access method)
unpredictable. 3 (Of a number) plucked from the drum, Tombola, by the flaky-
fingered lYche. 4 [From JARGON FILE.] (Of people, programs, systems, fea-
tures) assorted, undistinguished, incoherent, inelegant, frivolous, fickle.
=:> A mathematician in Reno,
Overcome by the crap and the vino,
Became quite unroulli
Expanding Bernoulli,
And was killed by the crowd playing Keno.

The neo-Gideons are now placing copies of R. von Mises's WahrsclreinIichk£itsrechnung

(Leipzig und Wien, 1931) in all Reno motel rooms. The least sober of gamblers, on
reading the precise formulation and proof that no system can improve the bettor's for-
tunes, will instantly repack, check out, and rush back to his or her loved ones. Some
may possibly return to their spouses and families.
1\\'0 anecdotes reveal the special attraction of random-number generators during
the birth-pangs of our fair trade:

"I always remember that occasion [the 1951 Joint Computer Conference,
Philadelphia, 1951] as being the perfect example of one foolproof way to demon-
strate a computer. The computer was programmed to print random numbers and, if
this was not enough to discourage undue curiosity about the accuracy of the results.
cocktails were served during the demonstration so that after a short space of time

ISO
 reality

no-one cared any more" (Maurice V. Wilkes, Menwirs of a Computer Pioneer

[Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985]).

"In the early 50's the Rekenafdeling (Calculator Department) of the Mathematisch
Centrumm decided to build their own computers. Therefore they hired two electri-
cal engineers, Loopstra and Jansen, I believe. They basically started installing some
sockets, getting some soldering irons, and went shopping on the flea market for
relays. One of their products was actually a real machine, I think it was called the
ARRA (Automatiche Relais Rekenmachine Amsterdam = Automatic Relay
Calculator Amsterdam). The main feature was that it was absolutely unreliable.
This was partly due to the fact that the relays were donated by the Dutch PTf
because they were sub-standard quality. One day the machine would be officially
kicked into life by the Dutch Minister of Culture and Science. To have it do some-
thing, van Wijngaarden programmed a random number generator. When the relays
clicked and the printer was spitting out numbers he told the official about the
unique nature of this machine: 'This machine can do what no other machine can
do; not in the U.S. nor anywhere else; it can produce True Random Numbers''''
(Jaap Akkerhuis <jaap@research.att.com> recalling a conversation with Adriaan
van Wijngaarden).

random file n. A place where records can get lost in any order. Compare
SEQUENTIAL FILE.

RDBMS See RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

RDeM n. [Reversible Document Collation Methodology.] Also called paper

clips. Compare with the Semi-irreversible Document Collation Methodology
associated with staples.

real life See REALITY.

reality n. 1 That to which users must awaken when the delivery-pending

party is finally over.
::::) The party's over, it's time to call it a day;
We've shipped your system intact, a terrible fact,
It's now on the way!
So you must wind up your flowcharting fun,
Just make up your mind, the programs must be run!
The party's over, and there's no time for a KLUDGE;
There's at least five or six lines still needing a fix
And here come the Judge!

2 [From JARGON FILE.] Also called the real world; a set of nonacademic sites,
typically using COBOL or RPG; the location of the status quo; (pejoratively) any
area remote from the joys of noncommercial computing. 3 A system devised
by Microdata Corporation (formerly CMC) offering a programming language

181
reasoning, ce-.b8sed

called ENGLlSH®. The dearth of programmers with any knowledge of English

may force a switch to something less exotic. 4 Epistemology The aggregate of
all headwords in this dictionary and its next 10,000 reprints. 5 "Dreams that
got funded" (Bob Brill, reported by Mark Halpern, IEEE Annals 0/ the
History o/Computing 16, no 3 [Fall 1994]).
reasoning, case-based n. A deductive apparatus frequently confused by
the facts.
~ When asked how his theory related to Nigeria, the economist replied "My approach
is more true in general than in respect to any particular situation" (recalled by Michael
Godfrey <godfrey@isl.stanford.edu».

reboot See RELOAD.

recursive adj. while (unclear) { unclear--; See RECURSIVE}

~David Hendry (Caltech) and Michael Godfrey (Stanford) suggested the addition of
a terminating condition to my original "recursive see recursive" entry. Of course,
unclear is assumed to be >= 0 before we enter the mill.

recursive acronym n. An ACRONYM that carries the seeds of its own pro-
mulgation. More at TNHD. Compare SARCONYM; RETRONYM. See also TLA.
~Recursive acronyms form a subset of the self-referential acronyms. Thus, the
Magrittean TINA (This Is Not an Acronym), VIRUS (Vital Information Resources
Under Siege, coined by Sandy Sherizan), and BASH (Bourne Again SHeil from FSF)
are self-referential but not recursive. The oft-quoted recursive archetype is GNU,
expandable as "GNU's Not UNIX," which invites further expansion. GNU, however,
lacks a "break clause" (other than lack of interest) and therefore represents the type of
endless recursion that our students are warned to avoid. Overlooked in the prior-cita-
tioneering scramble is VISA, defined as VISA International Service Association (noted
by David Harris). MUNG is often given precedence, but this started life (MIT ca.
1960) as "Mash Until No Good," until it was fashionably retro-recursified to "MUNG
Until No Good." See table below for other examples:

PINE PINE Is Not Elm

EINE EINE Is Not EMACS
ZWEI ZWEI Was EINE Initially
LIAR LIAR Imitates Apply Recursively

redo n. A single key or command that lets you quickly repeat the previous
error. See UNDO.

redundancy n. 1 A method of at least doubling the overall error rate of a

system by duplicating its most vulnerable elements. The exact improvement
in the total error rate will depend on the reliability of the devices used to

182
 rei••••

invoke each switchover to the standby elements. 2 A status in the nonem-

ployed environment earned by overzealous efforts to meet a DEADLINE.
reentrancy n. The special ability of some PROGRAMs
to mislead several users
at the same time.
~That PC-DOS is non-reentrant should therefore be considered its major advantage.

reference n. & adj. 1 n. Computer languages A pointer ashamed to admit it.

2 adj. (Of a computer trade book section) an ASCII chart followed by tables
copied from the official documentation.
reference account n. 1 A USERrelated by marriage to someone in the ven-
dor's marketing department. 2 A user awaiting delivery. See also REALITY.
regular adj. 1 UNIX (Of an expression) irregular; convoluted.
~One of the many AUTO-ANTONYMS in the DP laxicon. Regular expressions are ideal
if you want to grep (search) for strings that contain anagrams of U[]\ I*O-!-", end with
a period, but do not start with a caret.

Relational Database n. Also RDB. 1 A set of tables (relations) straining to

placate the unyielding Lex Coddonis. 2 A primitive collection of SPREAD-
SHEETSlacking embedded cell formulae. See also NULLABLE.
~lt seems that no canny royal-blue, all-the-way canonical, Coddeified ROB has yet
been implemented. The ROBs that have scored 76n7 may well be overtaken by
OBJECT-based databases before that final relational hurdle is surmounted. Although
based on Codd and Date's sublime algebraic axioms and normalizations, the ROB
does not readily map onto the many-valued logics and slovenly BLOBSof REALLIFE.
Many believe that storing all fields as POINTERSmerely postpones the crisis.

Relational Database Management System n. Also RDBMS. A pro-

gram or programs saddled with the task of handling a RELATIONAL
DATABASE.
release n. & v. trans. [Latin relaxare "to ease the pain."] 1 n. A set of
KLUDGES issued by the manufacturer that clashes with the private fixes made
by the user since the previous release. 2 n. also called next release. The long-
awaited panacea, due tomorrow, replacing all previous temporary patches,
fixed patches, and patched fixes with a freshly integrated, fully tested nota-
rized update. 3 v. trans. Marketing To announce the availability (of a mooted
product) in response to the release by a competitor of a product prompted by
your previous release.
~Care is needed to distinguish a last release from a next release, since the difference
is more than temporal. A last release is characterized by being punctual but inade-
quate; a next release avoids both errors. Next releases are worth waiting for. They are

183
reload

heralded with suitable hyperbole: "We bring you a fundamental purge of all past fol-
lies. A river of blood has been diverted to flush clean the Augean instability left behind
by the previous, s<H:alled programming team, the notorious, discredited Gang of Four;
their pathetic lackeys, the Shower of Sixteen in Documentation; the extremely evil
Coven of One who hired them all. They have each confessed freely to protect their mis-
erable pension rights. 1\velve of these unrepentant criminals were lynched by indig-
nant workers, but the rest, saved by the lunch bell, have been exiled to the Los Angeles
branch office."

reload Also called reboot, reset. n. & v. trans. I n. A button that is pressed
to warn the system that the operator has returned from coffee break. 2 v. trans.
To attempt an interruption of the DOWNTIME status. See also BOOTSTRAP.

remote adj. I (Of a boss) unaware of the current problems; harmless and
readily ignored. 2 (Of a device) unaware of the current protocols; destined to
crash the whole system if ignored.

reportage n. An advance form of DOCUMENTATION in which dull facts are

spiced by hopeful INSINNUENDO.

reserved adj. (Of a word) sedately predefined by the computer-language

designer and therefore unseemly when used hors de contexte.
~A potential AUTO-ANTONYM emerges in languages such as Pornol and Scatol where
the reserved words are far from prim.

reset See RELOAD.

response time n. An unbounded, stochastic variable T,.. associated with a
given TIMESHARING system and representating the putative time that elapses
between Ts, the time of sending a message, and Te' the time when the result-
ing error diagnostic is received.
~A certain degree of essential ambiguity is allowed in defining Ts and Te' but for
credible BENCHMARKS every effort should be made to ensure that Te > Ts' "For what
shall it gaineth an Manufacturer, that It winneth an Order, yet vitiateth the Laws of
Physik." (S1. Presper's Injunctions to the Philistines-level IV, release ii). In the post-
benchmark environment, Tr assumes a more subjective quality and a larger mean
value. In this context, subjective refers to the helpless feeling of the user, while mean
means "selfish, indifferent to the demands of others." In any given large-scale time-
sharing system, each user develops a mental model of the network by observing that
Tr varies according to type of input, time of day, etc. Many ploys have been devised to
minimize one's own Tr and, at the same time, punish the greed of others (e.g., A.
Hitler, Meine Rechnungsraumekiimpfe [Springer-Verlag, 1933.]) No quarter is given or
expected in this struggle for one's fair share of memory and CPU cycles. Compare
LEBENSRAM.

184
 retronym

The noblest and bloodiest examples of this warfare can be found on CAMPUS time-
sharing sites. The low cunning of the academic mind, further debased by an exposure
to computer science, has found new "corridors of power" to cruise (see e.g., C. P. U.
Snow, The JO Cultures [Puffin Books, 1977.]) Bypassing the flimsy onionskins of the
logon procedures; account number, password, and read-only private file protections;
priority-level, core, and compunit allocations provides a more pleasantly ferocious
diversion than all the traditional donnish disputations. The staff charged with protect-
ing and rationing the campus computer resources do their best by secretly changing the
rules at irregular intervals. Happily, this provides the user with a game infinitely more
subtle and exciting than Dungeons or Donkey Kong. Students, especially, have the
time (and the need for kudos) to freak the system, much to the chagrin of their elders.
Some, though, have claimed that this is the main vocational benefit offered by a col-
lege computer network, as it primes the student for the more advanced trickery need-
ed in the commercial environment, where compunits cost real dollars.

rest room n. The place where the rest of the OPERATORS can usually be found.

retromancy n. 1 Prophesying by looking over your shoulder. 2 The standard

Baconian PARADIGM: massaging past events to provide fundable extrapola-
tions. See alSO-MANey.
retronym n. 1 An ACRONYM post-formed by mapping letters to words or parts
of words. 2 "A noun titted with an adjective it never used to need, but now
cannot do without" (William Satire). Compare lWINS. See also BUNDLED.
~The example that triggered Satire's coinage seems to have been "analog watch." Until
"digital" chronometers appeared, it went with saying that watches had physically rotat-
ing hands. (Of course, there are now electronic timepieces with simulated, incorporeal
hands that you can wear on your wrist or use to wallpaper your GUI desktop.)
Intriguing DP retronyms include "natural language," "virtual reality," and "real
time" (submitted by Bill Gray of the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory).
Consider, too, the WAN (Wide Area Network), noted by Ted Jerome
<TJ_Jerome@tallysys.com>. The retronymic qualification "wide" was made neces-
sary only by the arrival of the LAN (Local Area Network) in the 19808. Jerome also
cites "end user," although some take this more as a valid insult than a true retronym.
USER has always been a term of abuse, with ironical nods to the rare agentive user, "one
who makes use of," or a natural confusion with used. "exploited." Robert DeShelter
(Southern California Edison) offers "sunlight," "whole number," "natural food,"
"whole grain," "organic gardening," and "wood-burning furnace." For the original
retronym, Joe McConnell suggests "human being," but this may depend on which cos-
mogeny you support.
Safire's definition needs a slight adjustment since retronyms are appearing as both
nouns and adjectives that demand retrofitted qualifiers. Thus, Jerome reminds us of the
eerie "human-readable." Does this qualify, I wonder, as an anthropo-anthropomorphic
retronym?

185
return

return n. 1 C The KEYWORD followed by an expression invoking the func-

tion's implementation. Z The callee's revenge. See also CALL; GOSUB; STACK.
=>Many computers now regularly beat Macys' return policy of three months.

reusability n. A marketing priority overriding that of usability. See also

OBJECT ORIENTEERING.

reversed class action n. DP LmGATION by one END USER against all named
and unnamed suppliers, nonsuppliers, assemblers, compilers, and their sub-
agents in the OEM environment. See also SNA.

rlghtslze v. To downsize or upsize depending on the prevailing circum-

stances. Compare SIDEGRADE.
=>There is no fashionable verb for remaining with what you have, although I expect
that a CEO will announce soon that "We are dedicated to a sarnesize paradigm at this
point in our methodological evolution."

ROM 1 Read-Only Memory. Compare WOM. Z Read-Once Memory.

=>Henry G. Baker and his fellow linear-programming theorists make a strong case for
"Read-once" identifiers. Others think that "destructive reading" as a solution to SIDE-
EFFECTs is "going too far."

root n. See SYSADMIN.

RPG [Report Program Generator] The precursor of all program generators,

justifiably maligned.
=>Those who assign generational integers to programming languages are divided over
RPG: some say OGL; others insist on (-I)GL.

RTFM interj. [Read The Fine Manual!] The standard brush-off advice to all
gadget users or, rather, would-be users. Now replaced by BTFFHS (Browse
the Fine Friendly Help Screen). See TNHD for less polite variations. See also
DOXOLOGY; INTUITIVITY.

=>Note that even exceptionally fine manuals have "erroneous zones," so the RTFM
advice is rightly supplemented by a warning to "ignore the wrong bits." The latter are
sometimes obvious from residual ARCHAISMS. Thus the section "Have you joggled the
cards?" in a gdb manual is almost certainly spurious. More so than in any other trade,
prior knowledge is a DP essential. Compare corK.

run-time Also runtime n. & adj. 1 n. (QA testing) the moment when the pro-
grammer shouts "Must run'" and disappears. 2 adj. (Of errors) all those that
sneak past the compiler and linker. See aiso LINT.

186
s
St. Presper (fl. 6 B.C.) The little we know of this early DP anchorite prophet
has been gleaned from three contentious sources: fragments of several
Epistolary Updates (now under close guard at the Prespertarian Chapel of
Computer Scientology, Palo Alto, California), the partly deciphered Dead-C
floppies, and the controversial epigraphs discerned only by the faithful on the
PLATENS of S1. Presper's printer relics. Many delightful schisms loom, but
most scholars are agreed that the updates were written by St. Presper (some,
though, may have suffered irreversibly from TEXTUAL HARASSMENT at the
hands of a careless editor); that he did more or less flourish (or, at the very
least, ran a fairly tight cave) some 6 years before the Coming; that he correct-
ly predicted the Coming and, with St. Johnny [von Neumann], prepared a way
for the Coming; but that once Turing came, S1. Presper retired, having seen the
Glory, to a monastic think cell near Philadelphia "to discount his beads," as he
later confessed in his famous Final Patent. DP hagiographers, of course, are
still unfurling and haggling over the Dead-C floppies, while the general pub-
lic, confused by the conflicting snippets so far released, are left to marvel that
these precious diskettes could possibly have survived more than 12 hours on
a moonlit shelf.
Some recently published fragments point to the existence of a sect called
the Atanasoffs, a shadowy group of abandoned ascetics possibly precontem-
porizing S1. Presper's cult by a whisker or two. One interpretation, reading in
and between the floppy's many lacunae, of an extremely mutilated text
(Tractus IX, seetori ix-xii) provides this warning from the Atanasoff leader
(also known as the Evil Priest): "Thou shall not covet (cover?) the ass (OS?)
of thy neighbor's wife (support system?), nor ride (write?) over his pome-
granate tree (data structures?) .... " It is hard to reconcile such an austere com-
mandment with any known, or practical, DP ethos.

sarcasm n. A cruel literary device; yet another nail in the AI coffin, as in "He
left the computer industry to join DEC."

sarconym n. Also called malignant acronym. 1An acronym slanderously

reinterpreted. 2 A non-acronym interpreted as a sarconym.
=>See table below:

Acronym Original Maligned

BSA Birmingham Smail Arms Bits Stuck Anywhere
DELTA Doesn't Ever Leave The
Airport; Don't Ever Land
There Again

187
sarconym

FOR Franklin Deficit Roosevelt

FIAT Fix It Again, Tony.
FORD Found On Roadside Dead
mM International Business Machines Inferior But Marketable;
Itty-Bitty Machines;
Incontinent Bowel
Movement; I've Been
Misled
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network I Still Don't Know [sic];
Innovation Suiting Demands
of Nobody; It's Still a Dead
Network; Infonnation
Superhighway Delivered Now
USP List Processing (language) Lots of Irritating Spurious
Parentheses
MIA Mobile Infonnation Appliance Missing In Action
MULTICS MULTiplexed Infonnation Many Unnecessarily Large
& Computing System Tables in Core
Simultaneously
NFS Network File System Nightmare File System
NT New Technology (Microsoft) Not There
NTSC National Television Standards Never '!\vice the Same Color
Committee
OWL Object Wmdows Library (Borland) Obsolete Windows Library
PAL Phase Alternating Line Perfect At Last
PCMCIA PC Manufacturers Card Interface People Can't Memorize
Association Computer Industry
Acronyms
PDA Personal Digital Assistant Poised to Disapppoint
Apple; Public Display of
Affection (U.S. Military
legal code)
SECAM Sys~me E1ecttonique Couleur System Essentially Contrary
Avec Memoire to American Methods
Shell Stinkt Hard En Loopt
Langzaam (Smells bad and
runs slowly)

188
 scope

sawteeth n. \pronounced sore'teeth.\ Wavefonns of a triangularly grating

disposition.

scalability n. Also called scalableness. See SCALABLE.

scalable adj. Of those rare devices or systems that can be enhanced without
degrading perfonnance. See also PILOT.

~Newcomers to the DP thimblerig are understandably surprised to discover that

increasing the number of processors or adding RAM does not guarantee improved
throughput. SPACE PRECLUDES a detailed explanation, but a useful analogy might be
found in the Frederick Brooks axiom that adding programmers to a project often
delays its completion. Exceptions to this depressing more-is-less rule form the highly
prized set of scalables, a fact that has been noted and overexploited by MARKETING.
Mere scalability, alas, is now view: chapeau, and nothing less than superscalable is at
all salable.
The etymology for DP usage is confused. You can take the Latin scalae "stairs, lad-
der," or skala "an early Germanic dandruff." Are we looking at the North Face of the
Eiger or into the eyes of Brother Saul (Acts 9: 18)? According to the creative Proto-
Indo-Europeans, the Latin root comes from skand- "to leap, climb," whence "scan,"
"ascend," and even "scandal." Equally intriguing, the Teutonic meaning derives from
skel- "to cut" which also gives us "shell," "scalp," "sculpture," "school," and "shelf."

scatomancy n. [Greek skor; skato-, "dung, excrement" + manteia, "divina-

tion, prophecy."] A futile WHAT-IF based on the shit in your database or spread-
sheet. See also -MANCY; WHY-NOT.

Schlumer, Fred (1820-1879) Apochryphal contemporary of Louis Pasteur

(1822-1895) both of whom studied the effects of micro-organisms on food.
~The story goes that Schlumer started each day asking"O Lord, will I ever purify this
f***ing milk?" Pasteur, they say, woke up each morning saying ''Today, My Lord, I
will purify this f***ing milk." Moral: Who ever heard of Schlumerized milk?

schoenflnkel v. trans. (LAMBDA CALCULUS) to replace (functions of several

variables) with a complex function of a single variable.
~The operation is now known as currying (after H. B. Curry), rather than schoenfin-
keUng, although Schoenfinkel seems to have priority (see J. M. Brady, The Theory of
Computer Science [Chapman & Hall, 1977, p. 255]). Compare SCHLUMER.

SCOpe n. Computer languages The putative region(s) of a program within

which a declared (named) object can be accessed and mutilated via its
declared name. Molesting an out-of-scope object calls for subterfuges, such as
POINTERS.

~Scope within compilation units, files, classes, functions, and blocks is further com-
plicated by the related concepts of visibility (affected by duplicate identifiers) and

189
scrolling

extent (global, local, dynamic, static, persistent, dew-on-the-com). Natural language

scope emerges as a risible antidote:

'''The greenhouse effect and the ozone layer have increased as a direct result of
more toxics" (Letter to the San Francisco Chronicle from an 8th grader).

"Is this the place where you live and sleep most of the time?" (U.S. Census form).

"Bed for sale by man with big brass balls" (Liverpool Echo advert).

"Dog for sale. Eats anything. Very fond of children" (ibid.).

scrolling n. [Old English scrowl"a convoluted ornament.") An option allow-

ing lines of data to move quickly up and off a VDU screen before they offend
the operator.
~Scrolling rates are being improved to counter the insidious spread of rapid-reading
techniques.

Scrolling, just scrolling,

Upward, and out of VUE;
We don't envy your lot
As you peer at the screen,
We'll prompt you for a second
Then we clear off the scene,
When we're scrolling, just scrolling,
To the safety of line minus 2!

SDH See SUPER DIGITAL HIGHWAY.

SE See SOFIWARE ENGINEERING.

seamless adj. [Origin: "Seams, madam? nay ... 1know not seams." (Hamlet,
act I, scene 2).) Mandatory DP usage: seamless integration: the fatal
removal of essential INTERFACES between incompatible subsystems. See also
SUPER DIGITAL HIGHWAY.

~Michael Schrage writes ••... Bill Gates vows his company will lead consumers to a
dazzling, new, multimedia future that seamlessly integrates the best of audio, video
and computer technology." Some care is surely needed, Bill. If the joins are too seam-
less (insufficiently seamful?), the "media" is reduced to one unvariegated lump, unwor-
thy of the prefix "multi."

segmented adj. Vulgar: use with extreme caution. Also known as shifty.
Relating to the Intel 8088/6 memory-mapping calamity whereby two 16-bit
registers mysteriously combine to provide a 20-bit address space. Compare
LINEAR.

~ The prolonged horrors of 8088/6 segmented memories have invoked the theory that
Motorola sneaked some agents provocateurs into the early Intel design team.

190
 semiotics

self n. See THIS.

self-antonym n. See AtrrO-ANTONYM.

self-referential adj. 1 (Of a statement) referring to itself often with inten-

tionally risible results, as in "Down with Categorical Imperatives!" "Never
employ a long word when there is an adequately synonymous diminutive."
"Solipsists of the World, Unite!" "Never use a preposition to end a sentence
with." "Eschew terminological obfuscation." "Is there a hyphen in anal reten-
tive?" 2 (Of a paper) containing a high-percentage of references to works by
the paper's author(s).
~Thus M. L. G. Shaw and B. R. Gaines, "Interactive Elicitation of Knowledge from
Experts" (Future Computing Systems Journal I, no. 2 [1986]) cites four references by
Gaines, B. R.; 7 by Shaw, M. L. G.; and 15 by Gaines, B. R. and Shaw, M. L. G. David
Bohm scores a creditable self-referential ratio of 10116 in his "Hidden variables and
the implicate order" (Quantum Implications. ed. B. 1. Hiley and F. David Peat
[Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.])

semantics n. sing. & pl. [Origin: Greek semantikos via sema "sign, token,
mark."] 1 n. sing. The study of the relations, if any, between signs and their
denotations, if any; a branch of linguistics, philosophy or SEMIOTICS depend-
ing on what these three tokens are taken to mean. 2 DP n. Meaning; meanings.
Compare SYNTAX.
~The English pioneers were not fooled by the singular Greek suffix -ikos and pursued
singular sciences such as "physik," "mathematik," and "semantik." The subsequent use
of "-ics" for these domains of study presented no real problems. Physics is and will
remain fun, and there's but one mathematics, even though its branches are legion. The
numbing, number confusion starts with the DP use of "semantics" as a sumptuous syn-
onym for "meaning" or "interpretation." Thus we find "IDAPI includes many database
semantics," and even "Our semantics are better than yours."

semantic domain n. "A semantic domain is more or less equivalent to what

is generally described by structural semanticists as a semantic field" (John
Lyons, International Journal of Lexicography 3, no. 3 [Autumn 1990].)
~Ah, the precision of NATURAL LANGUAGE!

semiconductor n. 1 A device for proving the semidecidability of the HALT-

ING PROBLEM. 2 Buses One who combines the duties of driver and (fare) col-
lector. 3 An optimistic semi-insulator. 4 Science fiction Innocent Crystal,
doped and raped by the evil Transistor.

semiotics n. Half a science of meaning is better than none. See also TEXTU-
AL HARASSMENT.

191
SEN

SEN n. SOFIWARE ENGINEERING News. An infonnal newsletter published by

ACM SIGSOFf.
=>The sad news is that in spite of 18 years of regular software horror stories, precise-
ly and wittily diagnosed by Peter G. Neumann, the same "Risks to the Public" contin-
ue to dodge the SILVER BULLET.

senior systems analyst n. An unsuccessful systems analyst temporarily

assigned to TICS, a manual Template Inventory Control System.

sequential file n. A place where records can get lost in lexicographic order.
Compare RANDOM FILE.

serial adj. Being or pertaining to just one damned thing after another.
Compare MASSIVELY SERIAL; PARALLEL.

server n. Also called suffering server. A system devoted to ignoring client

requests. See also CLIENT/SERVER; MIDDLEWARE.

SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.] The good news is that a mes-
sage has just arrived from Alpha Centauri. The bad news is that it claims prior
UNIX patents by 2 billion years.
setup n. & v. [Origin: Underworld A plot to incriminate and destroy.] See
INSTALL.

SetWorlclTransform n. A function in the WinAPI confirming the global

MICROSOFI' takeover plan. See also MAW.

seurat n. [Honoring pointillist painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891).] (ISO

OUi unit) 2 x 2 PIXELS.

Seven Catastrophes of Computing, The n. The user, the manufacturer,

the model, the salesperson, the operating system, the language, and the appli-
cation.
=>Recent advances in topology by Thom, Zeeman, and others have increased our
understanding of the structural instability of a wide range of systems. Catastrophe the-
ory has found applications in the analysis of physical, biological, and even sociologi-
cal phenomena. Catastrophes are, appropriately, global discontinuities that have
proved to be beyond the reach of traditional mathematical techniques. Happily, per-
haps, Rene Thom seems to have proved that for a (3 + I )-dimensional, locally Euclid-
ean manifold, such as the one most of us inhabit and within which most of our systems
run, there are exactly seven distinct types of catastrophe, one for each day of the week.

Seven Deadly Sins (From the Dubliners' LP "Seven Deadly Sins," Fiesta
Record Co., Inc., 1619 Broadway, NY, NY. FLPS 1773; words, McLean; tune
based on 'The Boys of the West" [trad.]) The sins cited by the Dubliners include
kissing, swearing, gambling, smoking, and boozing. The DP catechism adds:

192
 shift

Some say debuggin's a sin,

But 1 say it's easy to scoff;
For debuggin' has been in the world
Since Amazin' Grace Hopper's dead moth.
And if it wasn't legal then the lawyers they would sue,
And the prisons would be full of folks who nailed a bug or two;
And if they didn't like it, then away the girls would run,
And if it wasn't plenty then the puir folk would get none.

Some say spaghetti's a sin

But labels are easy to see;
And spaghetti has been in the world
Since EDSAC 1 branched with an E.2.5
And if it wasn't legal then the lawyers they would sue,
And the prisons would be full of folks who made a jump or two;
And if they didn't like it, then away the girls would run,
And if it wasn't plenty then the puir folk would get none.

Some say that GOTO's a sin

But where is the man who can tell?
For GOTOs have been in the world
Since the Devil was told "GOTO Hell!"
And if it wasn't legal then the lawyers they would sue,
And the prisons would be full of folks who made a branch or two;
And if they didn't like it, then away the girls would run,
And if it wasn't plenty then the puir folk would get none.
shareware n. Programs that are not worth pirating, as in "Who steals my
FLOPPY, steals trash" (Iago).

~Apart from heat and humidity, shareware is one of the few things that can reduce the
value of a blank diskette.

shell n. See BOURNE SHELL.

shift n. & v. trans. [Origin: Old English sciftan "to classify (people) accord-
ing to their undergarments".) 1 n. Anyone of the three customary DP work
PHASES, distinguished by the hours worked, the degree of supervisory vigi-
lance, and the subsartorial rancidity of the staff. 2 v. trans. Marketing To boost
the sales (of a product) by declaring a better PRICFJpERFORMANCE. 3 v. trans.
To select the wrong half (of a double-case character set). See also CASE; COM-
BINATORIAL EXPLOSION; PARADIGM; PARADIGM SHIFT.

25. E n F = Branch to instruction at n if accumulator >= 0 else perform next instruction.

193
shllop

shllop adj. also called zciweisakul. Reversed Polish. See POLISH NaTATION.

SHIT [Acronym for Square Holes in Tape.] Considered but rejected by

Olivetti (1958).

SHRDLU [Non-acronym, sarcastically expanded as: Simplistic Heuristics in

Reduced Domains needing Little Understanding.] A landmark AI program
devised by Terry Winograd, 1972, that "knew blocks." When asked why it
picked up the big red block, SHRDLU replied "Because you asked me to."
~Some say that SHRDLU represents the 7th-12th most frequent letters in English,
and that this fact was exploited in the keyboard layout of early typesetting machines
before the merits of a random layout emerged with the QWERTYUIOP arrangement.

shrink-wrap n. [Origin: shrink "a quack psychiatrist" + "wrap."] A trans-

parent covering that must be broken to access the contents of a software pack-
age, yet left unbroken to avoid legal acceptance of the DISCLAIMER.
~This Catch-22 has been known to drive some users to seek expensive counselling.

slde-effect n. An unexpected state-transition that the programmer quickly

proclaims as essential, nay, the raison d'etre of the application. Compare BUG.
See also ROM.

sldegrade n. A rare form of UPGRADE that does not degrade the status quo.
Compare RIGHTSIZING; SCALABLE.

~Sidegrades are usually performed to entertain and retain the support team, get rid of
the OPM, and verify certain emulationary strategies.

sliver bullet n. Also called magic bullet. The putative cure for all the ills of
our multi-wracked trade, esp. an Ehrlich-type pill for the syphilis of SOfTWARE
ENGINEERING.

~Fred No-Silver-Bullet Brooks is pessimistic, suggesting a wide range of patient,

evolutionary improvements rather than a single magic antibiotic. His case is somewhat
tarnished, however, when, apparently influenced by the scurrilous, antihistorical film
Amadeus,26 he calls for more "Mozart programmers" and fewer Salieris: a shameful
slur on Gluck's heir, the admired tutor of Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. Regardless
of musical talent, one would prefer one's life-support or missile-guidance system to be
programmed a la Tarare than Die Zauberflote.
Marketing, both academic and commercial, continues to promote a sequence of sil-
ver bullets: structured, object-oriented, fuzzy, neural, logical, functional, homed with
the devil's clauses, and so on. Cynics feel the need for silver handgrenades or even bal-
listic missiles. A rare optimist, though, has declared that "One day the grail will come
home to roost in the ballpark." See also OP VOGUE.

26. In spite of its many Academy Awards. Amadeus did not win an Oscar for Best Musical Score!
Not enough Salieri?

194
 Smalltalk

simplex n. 1The working part of a duplex. 2 A cheap complex. Preferred

plural: simplexes; adjective: simplexic, simplectic, simplexical, simplectical.
=>Beware of the pedantic, obsolescent forms simplices, simplicial. which have been
known to add 5 percent to a quotation.

slngle-case adj. 1(Of a character set) shiftless; unlikely to meet with ASCII
approval. 2 (Of a user) being the only one expressing complete satisfaction in
an IFIP opinion poll (1941-1994).
=>Although the user ticked the "no publicity" box on the questionnaire and IFIP guar-
anteed absolute privacy, 39 OEM suppliers mounted strong campaigns claiming the
sole credit for this nonce account.

slngle-char language n. A computer language boldly titled with a single,

invariably upper-case letter, e.g., as we go to press, A, B, C, E, J, K, and Z.
=>On the downside, this fashion encourages gap-filling language design; happily,
though, it reduces the total number of such languages to 26 (excluding, of course, dia-
critical compounding and ventures into non-roman alphabets and syllabaries).
A puzzling solecism needs to be mentioned: spurious quotationalism. Many writ-
ers are happy with Ada and Pascal, but feel compelled to quote the single-char lan-
guages: The package contains Pascal and "c" compilers.

sizing n. [Origin: size "to cut or otherwise shape (an article) to the required
disposition."] 1 Obsolescent The process whereby a system configuration is
devised to meet the prospect's various OP requirements. 2 In current usage
The process whereby a system configuration is devised to meet the prospect's
price ceiling. See also DOWNSIZING; UPSIZING; RIGHTSIZING.

Smalltalk n. Pure, slow but pure OOP; a family of object-oriented languages

developed (chiefly) by Alan C. Kay at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. See also
c++; OBJECTIVE-C.

=>Speed, of course, is a subjective criterion, subject to the inevitable advances in CPU

PRICE-PERFORMANCE. Purity, however, is apodictic. Smalltalk classes are Platonic ideas
and their instances (objects) are manifestations. Throw in your Leibniz monads and
Hobbes prudentia and the tingling epiphany hits: you can feel Smalltalk's philosophi-
cal purity slowly tugging the armpits. Hybrid OOP, such as C++, is quicker but sullied.
Bjarne Stroustrup defends hybridity, not with Kaysian polemic, but by pointing out
that practical dining requires both knife and fork. The fierce altercations between
Smalltalk and C++ supporters are reflected in Kay's comment:

"Where Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants,

computer scientists all too often stand on each others toes." (Alan C. Kay, ''TIle
Early History of Smalltalk," History of Programming Languages Conference
(HOPL-I1), ACM SIGPLAN Notices 28, no. 3 [March, 1993]).

195
.mert

smart adj. Lacking in dumbth esp. of a device with its own CPU,os, API,sup-
port team, monthly magazine, and bugs.
~The preferred DP noun fonn is "smarts" rather than "smartness."

smiley Also called EMarICON.See E-MAILHUMOR.

=
Smith numbers n. A composite number n such that S(n) Spfn), where S(n)
is the sum of the digits of n, and Spfn) is the sum of aU the digits of all of the
prime factors of n. Thus, 9985 is a Smith number since 9985 = 5 x 1997 and
=
9 + 9 + 8 + 5 5 + 1 + 9 + 9 + 7.
~The name reflects the fact that Smith numbers are as common as dirt (no offence
intended to all you fine Smiths out there).
Attention has therefore moved to consecutive (such as 728, 729) and palindromic
(such as 12345554321) Smith numbers. And now there are k-Smith numbers. For
example, 42 is a 2-Smith number because 42 = 2 x 3 x 7 and (2 + 3 + 7) = 2 x (4 + 2).
Some mathematicians are "not convinced thereby that Smith numbers are not a
rathole down which valuable mathematical effort is being poured" (Underwood
Dudley, Mathematics Magazine 67, no. I [February 1994], The Mathematical
Association of America).
But, wouldn't it be fun if some hidden property of Smith numbers emerged as the
key to unifying quantum-gravity field theory, revealing God as a "mere" recreational
mathematician?
smydge n. (ISO GUI unit) A 4 x 4 fuzzy PIXELmatrix, or four SEURATS.
See
BITMAP;BLYB.
also

SNA n. [Scapegoat Network Architecture.] A protocol in the OEMenviron-

ment, diluting the suppliers' obligations, but offering ENDUSERSand their
attorneys all the attractions OfMSR(Multiple-Source Responsibility). See also
REVERSED CLASSACTION.
SOB n. 1 Subtract One and Branch. 2 Son of a Bitch. Warning Often resists
contextual disambiguation.
~In the AlphaMicro M68000 assembler, the macro
SOB On, label

is implemented by
SUB #l,On
BNE label

If On starts life at 0, the two SOB's coincide.

social climbers n. C programmers who claim C++ experience in their CV s

(curricula vitarum).

196
 spece precludes I

:;;;>Theplural of vitae is used as a sop to my New Age and Hindu friends.

sod's law See MURPHY'S LAW OF PROGRAMMING. More at TNHD.

software n. The difficult part of the system, which still retains an aura of
intangibility in spite of being "engineered" and sold as a "product." Compare
HARDWARE. See also PRODUCTIZAll0N.

Software Engineering n. Also SE. 'The doomed discipline ... or how to

program when you cannot" (Edsger W. DUKSTRA). See also CASE; COMPUTER
SCIENCE; COMPUTING SCIENCE; PRODUCTIZAll0N; SEN.

:;;;>Thisattempt by the software community to acquire the mature prestige associated

with "real engineering" is naturally resisted by real, card-carrying, rule-sliding engi-
neers. Indeed, the job designation "software engineer" has been banned in some U.S.
states. But, in the other direction, after each bridge collapse and Hubble telescope fias-
co, many programmers rush to distance themselves from "engineering." Would any self-
respecting coder wish to be associated with the following reparational methodology?:

"Ground controllers had to scramble when shuttle commander James Wetherbee

reported during descent the failure of a mechanical gauge that displays the posi-
tions of the rudder, body flaps and other flight control surfaces. Mission control
told him to turn the power off and on ... " (San Francisco Chronicle. 11/2192).

Failing that, of course, the traditional engineer would try tapping the offending unit
with a light hammer. If SE does succeed, one can envisage the emergence of a new
metatechnology called EE (Engineering Engineering). See also saVER BULLET.

software rot n. Also called bit decay. [From JARGON FILE.] A hypothetical
disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that
unused programs or features will stop working after sufficient time has
passed, even if "nothing has changed." More at TNHD.
SOLID [Simulation of Optical Lithography In three Dimensions.] Silvaco's
chip-mask design program gains high marks for acronymic deftness.
SOM Overloaded Acronym: Start Of Message (ASCII); Systems Object
Model (mM); Semantic Object Modeling (David Kroenke). Warning Often
resists contextual disambiguation.
source code n. The version of a program to which the compiler OBJECfS.
See also DECOMPILING, JAMES JOYCE'S LAW OF.

space precludesl interj. Ignorance cloaked in a long-winded claim that the

author's word-allocation has been exceeded.
:;;;>"Space precludes" is not-too-distant cousin of "beyond the scope." Thus: "A thor-
ough examination of error analysis techniques is, of course, beyond the scope of this

197
SPAM

book ...•• (D. E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 2, 2d ed. [Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1981)).
Reader exercise: Discuss the meaning of "of course."

SPAM n. & v. 1n. Portmanteau: Spiced Ham (Honnel Foods Corporation). 2

n. Acronym: Society for Philosophizing About Mathematics (Ian Stewart,
Warwick University, UK). 3 v. To crash a program by overloading a buffer.
More at TNHD. Warning Often resists contextual disambiguation.
~Stan Kelly-Tubal writes: "The sublimest evenings of my life were spent chez
Babette munching her incomparable Spam en Sarcophage and chewing over the
Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms with the divine Penelope Maddy...•• (private communica-
tion, until now).
Adversely, regarding Spam qua feast, John Ryle (TImes literary Supplement, July
IS, 1994) writes: "How is it that this reductio ad absurdum of animal protein manages
to retain and even augment its allure? A clue lies in two acrostics ... written by Jack
Collom:
Suddenly, masked hombres seized
Petunia Pig
And
Made her into a sort of dense Jell-O
Somehow the texture, out of nowhere,
Produces a species of
Atavistic anomie, a
Melancholy memory of 'food'"

spectrum n. plural spectrums; mandatory DP usage wide spectrum(s). 1

[Latin spectrum "an apparition."] Any range of one or two items or features.
~A range of from three to seven features is known as a complete or total spectrum.
Ranges of eight or more are called unfair trading.

2 A fine series of books published by The Mathematical Association of

America, Washington, D.C.

speculative execution n. Taking a branch action before the result of the

test is known or knowable.
~Most BEQ (Branch EQual zero) instructions fail, so in situations where speed is
more important than accuracy, the execution flow can be anticipated without bothering
to test the CCR (Condition Control Register).

speedbar n. Ironic form of toolbar. A confusing strip of ICONS the least

scrutable of which are those designed by the user. See also OUI.

spelchek n. Also called spulchik, spllchok, ... A word-processing adjunct

that attempts to detect and, with the smart options, correct, your orphograthi-
cal sillysosms.

198
 SOL

=>Behind all the smarts lies a grunting, homonym-blind and homophone-deaf strang-
mitching routine fighting a stunted word database. Faced with the sentence "AI proves
it's benefits in speIl checking," my spelchek rejected only the string "AI". Some ver-
sions helpfuIly reveal their limitations, as in "shit is not in the dictionary, but it would
fall between shin and shiver."
Cabalistic lexicographers divine deep truths from such accidental contiguities.
Thus, the not-so-Random House Unabridged offers the compelling sequence, "mother
church, "mother country," "mother earth," "mother-f**ker," "mother goddess," and
"Mother Goose."
The corrections suggested by a spelchek also reveal unexpected insights. Michael
Orr reports that his Microsoft Word proposed "Fraud" and "shameless" in lieu of the
unknown "Freud" and "seamless." In spelchek veritas?

spirit guide n. Also CHANNELER.Politically correct tenns for DAEMON.See

also PC UNIX.

spool n. & v. [Origin uncertain: perhaps blend of spoof + fool; or archaic

acronym for Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line.] I n. A highly
volatile BUFFERestablished to hold surplus DATA(known as results) for a peri-
od not exceeding the MTTRof the particular output device being spooled. 2 v.
trans. To expose (data) to the dangers of residing in a spool. 3 v. intrans. To
shed previous results in order to proceed with more important computations.

spreadsheet n. [Origin: Anglo-Welsh, "the seasonal distribution of

manure."] The massive exploitation of Cartesian SIDE-EFFECTs.See also
MACROCEPHAUC; RELATIONAL DATABASE.
=>The strange, attorney-strewn spreadsheet story from VisiCalc to Lotus 1-2-3, thence
to Microsoft ExceIl and Borland QuattroPro, dominates the birth, growth, and travails of
the PC. From the hannless hobbyist calorie counter and home-games, joy-stuck toy, the
PC soon blossomed as the Uzi of CREATIVE corporative accounting. The WHAT-IF moved
to WHY-Nor, indicting the spreadsheet as the chief culprit in the 19808 S&L scandal.

SQL n. [Structured Query Language, IBM.] A shibboleth (Judges 12:4-6) for

detecting database poseurs.
=>Those pronouncing SQL as \ess-kew-ell\ rather than \sequel\ are instantly revealed as
charlatans incapable of confuting the six-and-seventy jarring normal forms. Those who
have really suffered are allowed to say \squeal\. Compare KLUDGE; QUERY PROGRAM.
Compare the crisp SQL,

SELECT CUSTOMER
FROM RECEIVABLES
WHERE DUE >= 5000
AND STATE = 'CA' OR STATE = 'OR' OR STATE = 'WA'

with the equivalent vernacular "Get dem effin' West Coast flakes dat owe me 5 gee or
more."

199
squiggle

squiggle n. [Portmanteau: squirm and wriggle] A mark of editorial censure;

a visible sign of TEXTUAL HARASSMENT. See also EDITOR; TEXT EDITOR.
~The wondrous set of ISO handwritten editing squiggles is threatened by the advent
of electronic text. 'TYpically,the cursive transposition of two tokens is now achieved
with an Alt-Ctrl-S macro.

SS [Abbrev. Schutzstaffel; Social Security.] Warning Often resists contextual

disambiguation. However, SS as Sommersemester; steamship; shortstop; and
scilicet (Legal) are megaparsecs away semantically.

SSR n. [Singular Source Responsibility.] A primitive castigational methodol-

ogy aimed at uniquely vectorizing the finger of scorn. More at SNA.
"To err is human, to dismiss, divine!"
(DPM Handbook [1976])

stability n. [Latin stabulum "a pothouse, haunt, brothel."] 1 A nirvana-type

situation that calls for drinks and layoffs all round. 2 The period between
crashes.

stack n. & v. trans. [Origin: stack "chimney," from the tendency of early reg-
isters to issue smoke after a hard day's pushing and popping.] 1 n. A special
area of memory designed that St. Presper's prophecy might be fulfilled: "For
the last shall be first and the first, last-and to hell with Mr. Inbetween"
(Sermon on the Mount Instruction, Release VI, level ix.) 2 v. trans. To smooth
out (data or instructions) by covering them with more data and instructions.
The resulting smoothness depends on the depth of the stack, the relative posi-
tion within the stack, the weightiness of the stack contents, and the power of
the PUSH. See also CALL; LIFO; FIFO. 3 v. trans. [Origin: stack "a large, orderly
pile of unthreshed straw."] To establish an impressive pile (of unread comput-
er listings).

standard n. [Origin: "L'etendard sanglant est leve" (''The bloody standard is

raised")-La Marseillaise.] 1 Formerly, what IBM did, but now what
MICROSOFT do. 2 The intersection (lowest common factor) of all pre-existing
implementations. See also AD HOC; ANSI; IMPLEMENTATION-DEPENDENT; ISO;
OPEN; PROPRIETARY.

~In DP usage "standards" is often of the singular persuasion, as in "Standards is an

area that is constantly changing" (Carl Cargill, Standards strategist, Sun Microsystems
Inc.). Implementors detest this volatility.

standard deviation n. A sexual activity formerly considered perverted but

now universally practiced and accepted.

200
 standby

A DP Freudian writes: "I divide my patients into two broad categories: those who are
turned on by normally distributed bell curves and those who are not. Do not fret, I tell
them all. One person's meat is another person's Poisson. That soon gets the idiots off
my couch, out of my sample, and into my accounts payable. The latter will give them
a real problem, and what our dedicated profession considers to be healthy mental
anguish."

standby adj. Denoting a relationship between two installed computers.

=*Given two systems A and B (usually, but not necessarily, from the same manufac-
turer) installed at points in the same compact manifold, we say that B is a standby for
A (written A - B) if B is down or overloaded whenever A is down or overloaded [Kelly-
BootIe 1984, 1985, 1986; Kelly-Bootie and Erdos 1944, 1945, 1946; Kelly-Bootie and
Euler 1781, 1782, 1783]. It is clear that the standby relationship is reflexive, i.e.,

(A - A)

and transitive, i.e.,

(A - B) and (B - C) implies (A - C)

but not necessarily symmetric, i.e.,

(A - B) does not imply (B - A)

Less formally: If B is standby for A, then B will certainly be out of action when A needs
help; however, there could be occasions when B is out of action or overloaded and A
is running happily. This lack of symmetry is not only a nuisance to the mathematician
(the well-known Unterstiitzensproblem) but also a breach of commercial etiquette.
Various methods of ensuring standby symmetry have been tried. If A and B use the
same level operating system and field-engineering team, there is an excellent chance
that A will be hors de combat whenever B seeks assistance. With this proviso, the
standby relationship is an equivalence relationship and defines a partition-some writ-
ers prefer the older but more appropriate term decomposition-of the set of all
installed systems.
We define {A} as the set of all X's such that (X-A). Clearly {A} = {B} if and only
if (A - B). If A is the only member of {A}, we say that A is stand-alone. Note that a
stand-alone system is neither more nor less vulnerable than a system belonging to a
larger partition. The DPM of a stand-alone system simply has a smaller telephone bill
and less clout with the manufacturer. For consider a partition containing three systems,
E, F, and G. When DPM(E), the DPM of E, needs help, he/she will place calls to
DPM(F) and DPM(G), who are just placing calls to each other and to DPM(E).
Depending upon the complexity of the various telephone switchboards involved and
the skill and persistence of the callers or their secretaries, a certain lockout time can be
expected before all three have exchanged mutual commiserations. Each can then con-
tact their respective bouc emissaire (fall-person or manufacturer's representative) and
listen to the usual excuses ("Are you sure your operator has four blank cards in the JCL
deck ... ?") before announcing that two other systems are in the same boat.

201
state-of-th •• rt

state-of-the-art adj. 1 Marketing A vacuous predicate applying to all items.

2 Technology Promising; untried; deserving of more funds. 3 Art
Postexpressionist, preminimalist, praeterfauve, and so on, depending on the
whims of National Endowments. See also VAPORWARE.
::::)Diluted by overuse, "state-of-the-art" is being usurped by more hyper bollicks. Thus
we have "the white-hot searing edge of technology" not only pushing but presumably
igniting the envelope.

Conundrum: "What's the difference between Socialist Realism and DEC's Alpha
chip?" Cute response: "Socialist Realism is the art of the state."

statistics n. The third member of the ISO MENDACITY SEQUENCE. See also:
FORECASTING.

::::)Exactly 76.3434 percent of all statistics (including this one) are invented on the spot.

stepwise refinement n. Any sequence of KLUDGES, not necessarily distinct

or finite, applied to the program P aimed at transforming it into the target pro-
gram Q.
::::)Formal kludge theory (a much-neglected aspect of AX point topology) deals with the
extremely non-Abelian group Kd..P) of all kludges on P. We often write KG when no
ambiguity threatens, and we freely speak of kludges of P, against P, and over P. A
stepwise refinement is a sequence {kj• t}, kj E KG' In theory, the time parameter t is con-
sidered as a monotonic increasing positive integer indicating the order in which the
kludges are applied. In practice, t is often left unrecorded, and we hear the comment
"God knows how many times we've changed P this week." We can express a kludge
sequence on P as (kn * k(tl-/) * ... kz * k/)(P) without explicit reference to t, provided
we remember that the k's are not necessarily distinct. Generally
kj * kj "" kj * ki for i "" =
j; indeed for some P, the first inequality can hold even for i j.
This and many other paradoxes have undoubtedly inhibited the fruitful development of
kludge theory.
We next introduce the concept of program isomorphism. We distinguish P = P'
(identical programs) and P - P'. The latter relation (read as "P is just as bad as P''')
includes identity, but also links different programs that produce identical calamities
(within tolerance). There is a unique unit element for all Kd..X)'s, the idempotent or
null kludge I such that

I (X) = X and (I*k)(X) = (k*I)(X)

for all X and all k E Kd..X). The null kludge is regularly implemented by means of the
copy or duplicate command. A safer method is to change one's password and take the
day off. A wider class of kludges, the so-called idimpotents, of P exist, defined as:

KtP) = (k: \7'k, kj E Kd..P). k*(kj)(P) - (kj)(P)}

or, more concisely, members of KtP) are ineffective and should be avoided.

202
 For each k e Kd..P) there exists a unique inverse Ie' such that

k * k-' = I = k-' * k
It can be shown that

(kfl • k t1-J * ... k1 * kJt' = (kt * k1-' * ... kll-('* kll-')

so that any series of miskludges can be readily corrected by applying their inverses,
with care, in the countersequential environment. Regular backups, though, are still rec-
ommended. Many (possibly infinite) pseudo-inverses of k e KG (P) satisfying

(x*k)(P) = P'
exist where P - p', P ~ P'. A pseudo-inverse of k, written k-', does not entirely reverse
the impact of k, but at least the resulting P' is isomorphic to P, i.e., (k-' • k) restores P
without measurable degradation. Nullifying such a transformatiom requires the further
refinement (k-')*«k-')-'), which may be hard to find. Many programmers confuse
(k-'t' with (k-')-' and (k-'t', which accounts for the low standards, missed DEADLINES,
and escalating costs of debugging. The power of (k-'t' can be illustrated as follows:

In (k-' * k)(P) = P, substitute k = (k-') and P = (k)(P):

(k-'t' * (k-')(k)(P) = (k)(P)

whence (k-')-' * Q = (k)(P) where Q - P. Potentially, therefore, (k-'t' can guide any
number of "near misses" toward the target version.

The weakness of (k-')-', on the other hand, can be demonstrated as follows:

In (k-') * k(P) - P, substitute k = (k-') and P = (k)(P):

(k-'t' * (k-')(k)(P) - (k)(P)
whence (k-'t' * Q - (k)(P) where
Q - P. It follows that (k-'t' is equivalent to (k) fol-
lowed and/preceded by an idimpotent.
The pseudo-inverses of k discussed so far satisfy (x*k)(P) - P. A thorough exami-
nation of all possible solutions to this equation is, of course, beyond the scope of this
low-cost work. (See also SPACE PRECLUDES.) The itchy reader is directed to Grundlagen
von Stiimperhaftstheorie (Berlin: Stflmper- Verlag, 1934).
To sum up, if Q is the "target" program, stepwise refinement is the trivial task of
constructing a kludge sequence {kj, t} such that

((k",t,,) * (kll-Jotll-J)* ...• (kZ,tl) * (kl,t/»(P) - Q

where n is reasonably small. Since the kludge product to the left of P belongs to KdP),
let us call it ks' The immediate identification and application of ks' whenever possible,
greatly simplifies the transition from P to Q and results in a single-stepwise or one-
kludge refinement. Formally, we have ks-(QP-'), which in one interpretation means
"erase P and create Q." This represents a symbolic justification of the Kelly-Bootie
Rule (see DEBUGGING), namely, that if the target program is Q, then Q should be writ-
ten, rather than writing P and a painfully converging sequence of k's.

203
stringent

stringent adj. (Of an expression) short. See CUlITATION.

studies n. Mandatory usage: recent studies. Anonymous results usually
from a "well-known West Coast University."
~Studies that vitiate your preconceptions are known as "flawed."
structure n. & v. trans. [Latin struere "to contrive."] 1 n. A quick-drying
cement offering instant cohesion to any number of unrelated modules. 2 v.
trans. To render (anything) less interesting. See also STRUCTIJRED.
structured adj. 1 (Of a proposal, memo, report) typed, often with numbered
paragraphs. Also called over-structured, esp. when typed with indentions
and subnumbered subparagraphs. 2 (Of a programming language) allowing
the user a limited quota of GOTOSaccording to age and experience.
subroutine n. [Latin sub "less than, inferior to" + routine "mundane, lack-
luster, boringly repetitive."] Any trivial, overdocumented program written by
your immediate superior.
~Hints for use: quietly debug, circulate laudatory memoranda, and incorporate it into
all your programs, theses, and bibliographies.

sufficiently large adj. As in "2 + 2 = 5, for sufficiently large values of 2."

summation convention n. A mathematicians' shindig held each year in the
Kronecker Delta.
SUN [Acronym for Stanford University Network.] An early UNIX network
based on Stanford-designed MC68000 machines.
~One of the commercial companies established to exploit this design, Sun
Microsystems Inc., is now the dominant UNIX workstation vendor. The change from
SUN to Sun was suggested by the Copernican model, with the added observation by
Scott McNealy that not only our planets but the whole cosmos is heliocentric.

super- prefix Laughably inadequate. Compare HYPER-.

supercomputer n. 1 Any machine still on the drawing board. 2 A machine
priced to exploit GROSCH'SLAw. See also GROSCH'SLAW,COROLLARY
TO.
~Of the two opposing trends in computer architecture, diffused microchips versus
centralized giants, Grosch's law supports the latter. In spite of the relative failure of
most supercomputer projects in the late 19508 and early 19608 (recall that the ffiM
Stretch was widely known as 1\vang), a strong lobby supports my proposal to replace
all known computing devices with one very big central system. As a concession, we
would reprieve the CDC Stars and Cray Mk. I's to act as remote job stations for the
proposed giant. A merger of all manufacturers and software houses would be needed,
and although no one could claim this would be an easy matter, it would have many

204
 supercomputer

beneficial side effects. We would see, for example, an end to the present glut of dis-
tasteful intercompany litigation which keeps so many OP AITORNEYS away from their
wives and families. To avoid linguistic squabbles, the big machine would support both
dialects of LISP (see LOGOMACHY) and possibly ALGOL 84.
A brief, unstructured protest can be expected from a few FORTRAN delinquents,
but calling the new supergiant GOD (General Oracle Dispenser) could shame such
petty opposition into righteousness. Those without shame would need to test their con-
victions against the burning passion of the ANSIIISO Inquisition-the stakes will be
high and merciless, for "better that an hundred Mirandas should burn, than that one
unrepentant Fortranite should goto free" (St. Presper's Imperative Injunctions to the
Gotoless, Level VD, release iv).
The question of where to site our proposed monster is still under review. Since
some 2000 square miles of floor space and 300 miles of socketed pipeline will be need-
ed, the most favored suggestion is that the whole of Ireland (both Ulster and the
Republic) be used. The present population would be persuaded, by means of an irre-
sistible "Make Way for GOD" campaign, to move to the more affable ghettos of
Liverpool, Boston, New York, Chicago, and Tasmania. In one swell foop, we would
solve the 6OO-year-old Irish question and the even older IBM-federal antitrust problem.
Even more importantly, GOD would eliminate all DP salespersons' territorial and
commission disputes that for so long have threatened the very fiber of civilization.
Mainframe sales would naturally cease under GOD, and add-on's, including peripher-
als, would be handled by the computer via RSEs (Request for Self Enhancement). A
typical RSE from GOD might be: "Add 256 MB RAM and 32 16 TB drives, OR
ELSE." These indications that GOD would develop into an implacable Hebrew
Testament tyrant have aroused some opposition to the project. The anti-GOD move-
ment is still fragmented, but the most credible of the opposition groups is led by Dr.
Max St••mp of the Nul Institute of Metaheuristics, Bergen, Norway. "By 2004," he
claims, "this fiendish machine will be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, self-per-
petuating, another IBM. Our terminals will become mere on-line confessionals. Are
we to become slaves to a huge pile of ruthless silicon? Must we kneel before a mere
list? Will our children be denied the pleasure of debugging a three-line BASIC pro-
gram?" His appeal to the Irish to join his "Kill GOD before it's too late" crusade has
had a mixed reception. Neither the Pope nor the Rev. Paisley has yet commented pub-
licly on the "Bring GOD to Ireland" plan, but many Irish are already packing to take
advantage of the subsidized airfares. Others are writing prophetic come-all-ye's:

Come all you gallant Irish lads

Wherever you may be;
I hope you'll pay attention
And listen unto me.
I hope you'll pay attention, lads,
Wherever you may dwell;
And of our countless troubles
The truth to youse I'll tell.
I hope you'll all be patient, boys,

205
Super Digital Highway (SOH)

While I the truth unfold

Concerning our misfortunes
The likes were seldom told;
So sit back, Jack, and just relax
And listen to my song;
'Tis something strange and tragical
It won't detain you long.
Go where you will, o'er valley and hill,
Past moutains short and tall,
[cries of "Get on with it, Paddy!"]
On every tree that used to be
You'll hear a modem call.
In every brook the stranger took
A job stream trickles by;
And where the birds once filled the air
There's drumheads on the fly.
My mother's cot, which meant a lot,
A base address, no more!
Electrical cords and circuit boards
Entwine around her door!
Why did she yield this compact field
The sod where Granuaille trod?
Two shades of green are all that's seen
In this binary land of GOD!

The most telling argument, though, against the mooted concentration of all computing
resources is the risk that, if they are sited within a certain critical radius, we might
incur a collapse under gravitational and recursive forces, leading to a DP black hole.
Conditions within such a black hole defy description. All known laws, including
Grosch's, would break down. The LISP syntax itself might be in danger. No signals
could emerge from such a massive discontinuity (a familiar and reassuring phenome-
non,perhaps, to many users), yet it would forever engulf and suck in any loose periph-
erals and unattached operators unwise enough to stray within its increasingly avari-
cious field.

Super Digital Highway (SOH) also called Super Information Highway,

InfoBahn. "A SEAMLESS web of comms, networks, computers, databases &
consumer electronics ... " (NIl Digital Highway Press Release); the Clinton-
Gore plan to empower the homeless with free waterproof modems and a share
of the information explosion.
=*Apparently, to implement this ominous mess, two committees have been "impan-
eled." At first glance, I read this as "impaled" (wishful thinking). What on earth is less
likely than two committees to produce a seamless web of anything but intrigue and
deficit? Who said "three committees?"

206
 superstition

Joe Perret reports from Hollywood that the endemic of Super Digital Highway
metaphors has reached Variety magazine with the headline "InfoPike." We must not
add to the rash of SDH pothole and roadkill jokes, except to note some of the road-
sign suggestions: "Last CRC for 50 miles!" "Beware of Falling Bits!" and "Slow!
Kermit Zone Ahead!"

superstition n. An irrational belief or ritual which survives until replaced by

a more effective superstition. The replacement is known as "updating the sys-
tem documentation."27 See also -MANey; PRAYER.
=>The DP trade, being more hazardous than seafaring and less predictable than fann-
ing, has generated more supersitions than these two older professions combined. In
addition to the more or less universal folklore of computer science, each site develops
its own local myths and the supporting rituals and incantations to placate the particular
in-house dyads, sprites, daemons, and nereids known to influence the stochastic quick-
sands of computation. The following examples illustrate the diversity of DP folklore:

"Red tape at night, payroll's delight."

"Joggle, joggle, joggle quick;

Throw the top card to Oulde Nick."

"Take a flowchart, add a square;

Draw a circle, join with care;
When a sweet accord is won,
Sign the chart 'Ben Nicholson.'''

"Glaucomus discus, seek forever;

Sector and track, forsake us never."

(To be chanted after each crash):

"Bittie, by tie, by tie, bit,
Holy, holy, holy shit!
By tie, bitty, bitty, byte,
Holy, holy, holy shyte!"

"We shall not, we shall not be moved; (repeat)

We're not re-Ioc-a-table, we should not be moved."

"Six lines in the file there be;

One for you and one for me,
One to comment, one to shun,
One to test, and one to run."

"In-house mouse, in-house mouse,

He ventured into a FILO nest;
The fanner followed, and all the rest;

27. "Superstitione tollenda religio non tollitur" ("Vou cannot get rid of religion by eliminating
superstition" (Cicero).

207
auperuser

The mouse is now a pennanent guest;

In-house mouse."

"Too many tenninals spoil the response."

"A patch in time makes nine."

"When Adam punched and Eve dem'd

Who was then the DPMT'

"Two's complement, three's a crowd."

superuser n. also called root. See SYSADMIN.

suspect n. A name on a prospect list offering little or no prospect of future

sales. Compare INTROSPECT. See also TRAVELING SALESPERSON PROBLEM.
SW5 n. A modal logic discovered in London.
~11Ie general idea is that everyone knows everyone in Chelsea, at least in the bibli-
cal-semantic domain.

sweatshop n. A department devoted to the rapid, accurate, and cheap entry

of data.
~ Punch, punch, punch,
In poverty, hunger so hard;
And as she skipp'd
And as she dup'd
She sang the "Song of the Card."
(Thomas HOd, Lochentotenlieder)

syllogism n. An early (Aristotlean) template for making logical inferences.

~The dangers of careless syllogistic reasoning, of the kind that machines have diffi-
culty avoiding, are illustrated by the following well-known examples:

God is Love No cat has five tails

Love is Blind I am no cat
God is Blind I have five tails

All green-cheese objects orbit the Earth

The Moon is a green-cheese object
The Moon orbits the Earth

All soi-disant Cretans are liars

All liars are mortal
Socrates says he's a Cretan
Socrates is a liar
Socrates is immortal

208
 systems analyst

symposium n. [From Greek syn "together" + posis "drink."] 1 A gathering

of scholars where each attendant is intoxicated by hislher contribution and
sobered by the lack of response. 2 DP usage One of several symposiums
(Archaic symposia.) 3 The academic Happy Hour during a CONVENTION.

syntax n. 1 (Natural languages) the presumed set of rules/tests that would

generate/validate all and only "grammatically correct" sentences, including
the few, possibly this, that have "meaning." 2 (Computer languages) the set of
rules/tests embodied in the compiler regardless of the designer's formal and
informal intentions. Do not see SEMANTICS.

sysadmin n. often intercaps SysAdmin. Also called root; avatar; shiva;

superuser. Soviet-type contraction for systems administrator. 1 The UNIX-
installation supreme, grosse banane, diktat-dispensing apparatchik who allo-
cates disk space, home directories, and passwords. 2 A bimonthly journal
from R&O Publications, Lawrence, Kans. See also GURU.
~Other sysadmin duties include, but are not limited to, booting, rebooting, shut-
downs, backups, file-integrity, security, virus-detection, disaster-recovery, links to
other sites, performance-tuning, prioritizing, policing, punishment, documentation,
education, upgrades, and posting "Your mother doesn't work here" notes on the site
microwave. A rumored compensation for these underpaid chores is the freedom to
read, write, execute, or erase any user file as the mood dictates. Hence the quip: "Our
sysadmin was expelled from the Gestapo for excessive cruelty" (Henny Thumpman).

system suffix & prefix 1 suffix A delimiter used to signal the termination of
a string of OP nouns and adjectives, as: "executive file control system,"
"information processing system," "control program generation language sys-
tem," "computer system." 2 prefix An indication that the following object or
property is beyond the pale of the average user, as: system memory, system
performance, system goal, system interrupt, SYSTEMS ANALYST, SYSADMIN.
~The noun system has lost all discernible meaning in current OP usage and
is best avoided except as an occasional aid to right-hand justification in
certain word-processing systems!
Originally meaning "an orderly combination or arrangement of parts or elements
into a whole," system suffered early and massive debasement in OP parlance by
being applied indiscriminately to any old ratbag of seamful components. It is prob-
ably too late to restore systematic precision (compare, for example, the many dila-
tions of nice since 14(0), for we can hardly expect a manufacturer to launch "The
all-new XYZ nonsystem which we hope will soon be SEAMLESSly integrated in an
orderly fashion."

systems analyst n. An unsuccessful programmer who, to maintain the sys-

tem's integrity, has been disbarred (removed from all keyboards) and assigned
to an off-line TEMPLATE.

209
T
T-shirt n. A cotton, torso-hugging sandwich-board.
~A quirk of the times is that we now pay advertisers to wear their promotional rags.
Dubious, possibly illegal, DP examplars carry the legends "Dual Floppies" and
"Look'n'Feel."
tacky mat n. A device originally designed to remove dust from the shoes of
anyone entering "clean" areas such as the old-fashioned computer installa-
tions. Present-day systems, though, actually thrive on a certain amount of
GRUNGE, and the tacky-mat makers seemed doomed to join the dodo-stuffers
local of the Taxidermists' Union. The advent of SuperGlue™, however, has
recently revived the craft. Dr. McTavish has extended the use of the mat to
solve the vexing problem of site security. His invention was launched with the
slogan: "Keep the buggers out with McTavish's Tenacious Tacky Mats!"

target audience n. (COMPlITER BOOKS) all breathing primates with $34.95

spare change.
~The convention-call equivalent is "Who should attend?" except that the "breathing
primate" condition is extended to all credit-card carrying organisms, living or dead.
An intriguing branch of literary "theory" covers the complex "relational matrix"
between "text-provider" and ''target-reader.'' Thus, one ponders lengthily why Mario
Salvadori's Why Buildings Stand Up is not selling well in Sarajevo, or why The Eat-
What-You-Uke Diet Plan flopped in Rwanda.
Consider too The Revolutionary Guide to Turbo C++, by Valery Sklyarov (trans-
lated by Sergei Ponomariov), Birmingham, UK: The WROX Press, 1992.The large red
C++ of the title is made to look like a hammer and sickle, the erstwhile epitome of rev-
olutionary icons. However, with a touch of free-market decadence the book opens with
the quaintly worded section "Who is this Book Aimed at?" As with all such target
delineations, the blunderbuss is cocked widely at "experienced programmers and
beginners who want to learn C++." The true Stalinist approach implied by the title and
cover would surely dictate a must-or-else-Gulag readership, conscripting those who
have no desire to learn C++ at any level. Professor Sklyarov is a prolific and respected
author back in the ex-USSR, the Russian Peter Norton, in fact. He teaches computer sci-
ence at Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Lenin called the White Russians "revanchist reac-
tionaries," so perbaps the correct target readership is "all counter-revolutionaries with
ill-gotten hard currency."
template n. 1A hardware device for producing stylized graffiti.
~A tangential application is the preparation of fLOWCHARTS. Irish Business Machines
offers a single-sidedtemplate that reduces the cost of the holes. More versatilemodels are
double-sided,with one side (face down, 9-edge leading) designed for TOP-OOWN symbols,
while the obverse (face-up, 12-edgetrailing) is intended for B01TOM-UP applications.

210
 teminology

The most expensive template ever constructed belongs to Xerxes P. Qume, Jr.• an
amateur AI buff from Ottumwa. Iowa. His symbol shapes were cut to ANSI X3.5 spec-
ification by laser beam into a 4- x S-inch plate of pure ruby at a reputed cost of $2.5
million. Mr. Qume runs a Radio Shack TRS-SOand has resolutely turned down many
trade-in offers from Amdahl and eray.

2 C++ An overdue mechanism for data-type parametization. overloading the

symbols "<" and ">" rather than the already superloaded "(" and ")". 3
Computer Science & Folksong A useful pattern (PARADIGM) when creativity
flags. as in. "X-aware," "X-compliant," "X considered harmful," "Come all ye
bold X," "I was born in X, raised on the Y side," "You don't miss your X 'til
your Y runs dry," and "If all the young X's were Y's on the Z."

temporary n. C++ An OBlEcr that is either destroyed before it has served its
purpose or persists long after its useful span.

teramlte n. 1 The charitable donation from ajackpot-hitting widow (cf. Mark

12:42). 2 A massive invasion of acarines.

Tennlnal Dlsease8 Inc. An international company devoted to performing

post mortems on dead terminals. Their computerized service and diagnostic
center is "on the net" (INTERNET), whence their proud slogan, "If you can
reach us, you don't need us."

terminology n. Both the nomenclatura and its catastrophic side-effects. See

also ONOMANCY; WINDOWS.
~In my version of the musical "Oklahoma" the lexicographer and terminologist
"should be friends." The poor passive lexicographer tries to divine meaning from
occurrence in a world of Tweedleda. while the terminologist is devoted to actively
assigning useful words to (possibly) new objects and ideas. In real-world fact. the
writer-creator of (possibly) fresh concepts introduces terms that take off before the ter-
minologist is consulted. The unfazable lexicographer reports that "class" and "object"
are used ambiguously this-and-thus. but the terminologist gnashes his or her gteeth.
In an innovative dissertation. Tweedledum's preamble declares that "X means y"28
and no harm is done if Tweedledee simultaneously announces that "Z means Y." Here

28. "It is to be observed that a definition is, strictly spea1cing, no part of the subject in which it
appears. For a definition is concerned wholly with the symbols, not with what they symbol-
ise ....Theoretically. it is unnecessary ever to give a definition ...it is, nevertheless true that they
[definitionsl often convey more important information than is contained in the propositions in
which they are used .... First, a definition usually implies that the tkfiniens is worthy of careful
consideration. Hence the collection of definitions embodies our choice of subjects and our judge-
ment as to what is most important. Secondly. when what is defined is (as often occurs) something
already familiar ...the definition contains an analysis of a common idea, and may therefore express
a notable advance (A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica. vol. 1 [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1920), pp 11-12).

211
we have the nonnal synonymicity that all language is heir to. But if Tweedledee states
that "X means Z," where Z and Y are antonymical, we invite the car bumper sticker:
"Eschew tenninological obfuscation." Many critics of the DP laxicon fail to distin-
guish healthy synonyms from confusing ambiguities.
The latter often arise from the overloading of "familiar" tenns, a habit common to
those scientific domains that misguidedly shun neologisms. Consider "space," "real,"
"set," "crank," and "fiber bundle" in Mathematics, "syzygy" in Astrology, "deep" in
Linguistics, "thinking" in W. Danny HilIis's multiprocessors, and "individuation" in
quantum mechanics.
And, even as you read this, new concepts are expensively searching for old, trade-
remarkable words, and vice versa. Thus a screen subrectangle becomes a Microsoft
Window-who would pay $99.95 for Subrectangles 3.11 And thence the struggle to
assign "frame," "pane," "silI," and "shopper" to related marketable ideas.

T EX \pronounced tech[guttural]\[1MAmerican Mathematical Society.] Don

Knuth's ultimate metafont, metamacro, metatext formatter, ideal for printing
your poems in ever-decreasing spirals in either direction.
~Correct pronunciation of the Greek chi is the shibboleth that distinguishes gen-
tlepersons from players (compare SQL). Some have even suggested that the subscript E
calls for a dipping intonation as in the fourth Mandarin tone. Note also that non- T EX
systems can be spotted by their references to TEX or TeX without the proper kerned
subscription.
I used to think that T EX's ability to print in spirals fell into the category of "clever
but pointless" (rather like, as we say in Liverpool, being able to fart the tune of "Annie
Laurie" through a keyhole), but a recent piece of serendipitous research has changed
my mind. A large clay disk, known as the Phaistos Disk, was discovered in Crete in
1908. It has engraved pictograms on both sides that have not yet been deciphered. The
Phaistos Disk has been dated to ca. 1700 D.C.E. and according to John Chadwick has
"the distinction of being the world's first typewritten document. It was made by taking
a stamp or punch bearing the sign to be written in a raised pattern, and impressing this
on wet c1ay."29
The amazing fact is that the script on each side of the disk runs in a spiral. The more
amazing fact is that after much scholarly dispute, it is now agreed that the script runs
from right to left (unlike other Minoan scripts), and from this fact and other clues it
can be shown that the script was "typed" from the rim down to the single pictogram at
the center. The T EX spiral examples, as I recall, take the easier center-to-rim direction,
but no doubt, given fixed strings and diameters, T EX could match the efforts of those
pioneering typists. I am calling on ANSI to establish standards for circular paper
sizes-the Phaistos Disk is 6 1/2 in (160 mm) in diameter, by the way, which clearly
deserves consideration as the ad hoc standard. I believe that the disadvantages for
humans in reading spiralized text are more than offset by the ease with which paper

29. John Chadwick, Linear B and Related Scripts (University of California PressIBritish
Museum, 1987).

212
 text editor

"disks" can be scanned by OCR "heads" using obvious and minor adjustments to our
present mass storage technology.
Rumor reports the scurrilous graffito at Stanford: "Knuth's secretary uses
WordPerfect." More at TNHD. See also CASE-INSENSITIVE; X, CURSE OF.

text editor n. [From Latin texere "to weave" + EDITOR.] The software need-
ed to generate any number of deviant copies from an original, correct text. See
also SQUIGGLE; lEXTUAL HARASSMENT.
~James Joyce's Finnegans Wake provides an early example of the random distortions
which can arise when editing literary texts on a computer. Dr. Thumpkins's monu-
mental Key to the Key to the Key to the Key to Finnegans Wake (known as "Key to the
fourth" in the Joycean industry) paints a convincing picture of Joyce pounding suc-
cessive versions of his ironically named "Work in Progress" into a primitive GLASS 1TY.
Thumpkins proves conclusively that Joyce's failing eyesight was a result of what DP
ophthalmologists call "myopia terminalis." There remains some doubt, however,
regarding the compiler used by Joyce. The constantly occurring ALP motif (Anna
Livia Plurabelle) suggests that the anagrammatic APL or PAL languages were used.
One remains confident that a period of scholarly vituperation will resolve this ques-
tion. Certainly the published text, as we have it today, is an intriguing melange of text
files and backups, together with bits of source and miscompiled object code from the
editor itself. Thumpkins is now studying the following hitherto unpublished Joycean
fragment, reported to have appeared on a disconnected CalComp during a DP seance
held in Dublin on Bloomsday ]979.
"I AM the begin/end. Declare all positively. And weren't we all in the DOS house
together, boys, up to our flying heads in the floating fixed-length turds, overlaying
our dunderheads and undermining our overheads, greytrackedsuited in every
whitecollared, blackboxed sector with never the sign of a bit of a byte to console
our terminal demands? Access me no succubus till I abscess all those who abacus
against us.
"0, Father Tee Jaysus O'Watson! send not yer therribly numerate bugs to
plague us! Think, tank, or forever hold yer world-piece-wise-linear-vector-bundled-
policy. Shall I compare thee parotty-fashion, sweet Brighton Poly? Flame, flame!
Or else to some odd-holed who-doughnut? WATFOR,esprit de core? Wipe that lisp
off yer interface you unprintable, parenthetical swine. You COR well, mes petits
CONS. LET no bound fairyballs go free WHILE we decompile in oure haze of
algohol.
"In endless loops my grandfather/father/son lies, their bones of CORAL made.
Arrays! Arrays brave Fortranbras and tak the low code while Putney Bridge is
falling down. I see hell! ICLl I see hell in your eyes; one single-tender glance. All
hands off DEC as we cross the Hudson, the river of low returns. Seekest thou the
sweet Honeywell, well, well or the feedholes of a naked Burroughs lunch? Holy
Macro, Mother of GOD, things Rank Xerox and Herb Grosch in nature possess us
merely. That it should come to this. Not three months merged. Nay, not so much.
The one true road beckons. Una vecchio. Univaccio. 0 Lord, sperry us from their

213
 fastrandy forcesales. I hear the crash of distant drums. Mauchly eckerstistical! Is
the END so near? Halt-tape-jam-break-fast. 4K the lot."

textual harassment n. The actionable adjustment of an author's submis-

sion.
~Umberto Eco is my favorite standup semiotician. One day he may quit stalling,
eschew half measures, go Ie tout cochon, and become a full otician: ••... the first draft
of Eliot's Waste Land opened: 'April is the cruelest month. And March isn't all that
great, either'" (The NY Review of Books, June 9,1994).

that pron. & adj. See TIllS.

THINK sign n. A printed injunction formerly issued to all ffiM employees and
prospects, but withdrawn when too many of the recipients developed symp-
toms associated with a thoughtless, literal interpretation.
~The original I I
THINK sign was, in fact, introduced by Thomas J. Watson, Sr., at
the turn of the century when he was sales manager of NCR, some 20 years before he
founded ffiM.
Before adopting the slogan for his new company, T. 1. commissioned a local think
tank to devise pithier mottoes. He quickly turned down:

Endeavor constantly to employ fully your ratiocinative processes.

on three grounds: (1) lack of pith, (2) the high cost of sign bytes, and (3) to blatantly
avoid a split infinitive was a shade un-American. The next proposal submitted to the
great man was based on the noble, universal dignity and snobbery of the Latin epi-
gram:

COGITO ERGO VENDO!

VENDO ERGO SUM!

T.1. quietly pondered. "I think, therefore I sell; I sell, therefore I am. Well ... the syllo-
gistic conclusion seems sound enough in a naively existentialist epistemological
framework, but, as you know, the truth of the implied proposition can in no way be
taken as a validation of either antecedent. In other words, I reckon you're putting
Descartes before de horse!" A wry chuckle split his wrinkled face. "I need time to
think it over," he beamed. "In the meantime, you're all fired."

this pron. & adj. c++ The implicit pronomial keyword POINTER such that
*this (known as self in other OOP languages) represents the object under
discussion.
~Although that, those and these are not C++ keywords, the concepts are read-
ily implemented by explicit data members pointing to or referencing other objects sans
gene.

214
 time ININigement

In general usage, the demonstrative "this" is full of surprises. For example, the
TV !Radio advert preamble "And now thiS... " is self-negating, a warning to grab the
muting device.

thrashing n. The punishment meted out to greedy users by a tired, confused,

and overworked multiprogramming system.
thread n. 1 A poor but honest process trying to survive in a hostile environ-
ment. 2 A time-wasting sequence of messages unrelated to your target topic.

threadbare adj. (Of an os) unable to support multithreading.

~Thus, billions of DOSusers, too poor or cowardly for os/2 or UNIX, are unable to
process and print their words while their SPREADSHEETS
are suffering background recal-
culation.

throwaway adj. (Of a program) sold below cost for public debugging. See
also PROTOI'YPING.

throwaway character n. Any character in a transmitted message.

~Prior discussion with the common carrier can sometimes limit the set of throwaway
characters to, e.g., alpha only, least significant digits, etc.

Thumps, Micky Also St. Micky Thumps or St. Micky. The patron saint of
timesharers See CURSOR.

thunk n. [Origin: Fred Descartes (no relation): "I thunk therefore 1 was."]
Ingerman's procedure for implementing calls by name via Landin's applica-
tive expressions (1961). More at TNHD.
~To clarify this in the Wmdows environment, MakeProcInstance takes a point-
er to the AboutDlgProc procedure and a pointer to the current instance of your pro-
gram and binds the two together. This creates your thunk, a prolog or small piece of
code that identifies a data segment and then branches to the window proc. The thunk
thereby ties the shared code to the data segment of one instance ... (cont'd. page 3029).

time n. & v. & adj. 1 n. "That which tries to prevent everything happening at
once." (Anon.) 2 n. That which flies like an arrow esp. when the MT grant is
running low. 3 adj. A species of fly that infests arrows. 4 v. To measure the
speed of flies esp. using a methodology devised for archery. See also KBMT.

time management n. The extension of memory management techniques to

that other vital computing resource, time.
~ The random-access time (or RAT) board is plugged into the standard S-1 00 bus just
like an additional memory board. RATs come in a variety of 8-, 16-, 32-, or 64-Kt
(kilotick) configurations with many bank-switching options. The tick, of course, is the
standardized byte of time, which will vary according to the system's basic clock fre-

215
timesharing

quency. The Lorentz dilation factor can be safely ignored except for those manufac-
turers reporting exceptionally fast-moving inventories.
Each RAT provides either shareable or user-dedicated blocks of addressable cycles
that can be "stolen" by the cpu as required. With the advent of the megatick chip and
more advanced cycle-compression techniques, we can now envisage a computing
framework offering better than real-time processing. Under the mooted virtual time
management environments, the user would be able to access pages of stacked-fixed-
tick blocks controlled by the stacked-fixed-tick-block clock. When a virtual RAT
becomes exhausted (or "totally cycle-depleted"), it would issue a stacked-fixed-tick-
block-clock nack, and this would initiate some form of recycling procedure. The lat-
ter, as yet unsolved, problem is at the searing, white-hot tip of technology and explains
the recent renaissance of IBM's Time Recording Division, which has quietly taken
over both the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Havant, U.K. facilities. The RAT race has been
summed up by Prof. Manfred ThUmps: "Forget the Top Quark; we want the anti-
chronon!" In what bizarre high-energy situation these elusive particles wilI emerge
remains to be seen. Time will tell.

timesharing n. [Origin: English folk song "Let No Man Share Your

Thyme."] A system in which many users try to corrupt the same database
simultaneously.
=>To protect itself, the system traditionally increases RESPONSE TIME until the user
loses interest. See a/so CURSOR.

time slice n. The occasional CPU cycle begrudgingly conceded by the oper-
ating system to the user. Also called the period at risk.
=>1)'pically, the os compares the complexity and importance of your programs with
those of its own internal problems. It then allocates time slices (and memory, perhaps)
accordingly. If you do gain a brief place in the JOB TRICKLE, you can be assured that
you really do have a problem. See a/so RESPONSE TIME.

TLA \pronounced Tee-EI-A\ Abbrev. Three Letter Acronym or \pronounced

TLA\Acronym for Three Letter Abbreviation. [Origin: the Semitic consonan-
tal triads.] More at TNHD.
=>TLA offers 263 = 17,576 distinct upper-case combinations but time is running out.
We know that since Ed CHERLIN joined the Hanoi Tower monks in 1991 their ring-
swapping algorithm is much improved-the brief history of time could be briefer than
we thought. On the other hand, we have so many TLA OVERLOADS that it is difficult to
predict TLA exhaustion.

TM n. [Time Management.] A fashionable branch of management science

devoted to the proper utilization of the executive's extraprandial time
resources. An intense, full-time, 3-year course is offered by the Thumps
Institute for Advanced Business Studies, an unusual feature of which is that
diplomas are awarded only to those who drop out after 10 minutes.

216
 TQM

TNHD The New Hacker's Dictionary. Also called R&S. See JARGON FILE.

top-down adj. Relating to a programming methodology whereby unwritten

modules are linked together to produce the target program. Compare BOITOM-
DOWN; BOITOM-UP; MIDDLE-OUT. See also METIlODOLOGY.

~The chief advantage of top-downing is that unwritten modules can be linked with-
out the bothersome interfacial anomalies encountered between written modules. Rivals
who preach the bottom-up approach warn us that top-downing is simply a naive way
of postponing the gruesome day when all must be made clear and sweetly dovetailed.
As with the other seven and twenty jarring schisms that divide the computing fraterni-
ty, the top-down/bottom-up controversy does not seem resolvable by "old, barren
Reason" alone. The dispute affects only largish software projects, although one hears
of classroom exercises where two weeks are spent discussing the correct programming
strategy for a five-line BASIC assignment to list factorial N until the paper runs out.
The outsider might argue that if you start at the top, the number of directions available
in pursuit of your dream is severely limited. Likewise, as confirmed in many a popu-
lar song, the only escape from an infimal situation is upward. The outsider is well
advised to mind his or her own business. For any major software project, in fact, there
is no start, finish, bottom, or top. Such concepts do emerge fleetingly, from time to
time, as each deadline passes, but the one true coordinate, when all the obscurantist
theologizing has evaporated, is the middle of the project. This is no mere ecumenical
compromise, but a fundamental tenet of the middle-outers. The latter have gained
many converts of late thanks to a well-equipped and persuasive Inquisition.

Tourette's disease Also Tourette's syndrome. n. [after Georges Gilles de

la Tourette, French neurologist (1857-1904)] A motor incoordination associ-
ated with echolalialechophrasia (the meaningless repetition of words) and
coprolalia (obsessive use of obscene language); commonly found among
overworked c programmers.
~The obvious symptoms are random scatological strings in both code and comments:

whPRINTFile «type = getop(shits, MAXassOP» !=Episs)

swPRINTFitch (type) { ... } \\f**kme it's S.Oaro

TPD n. Overloaded abbrev. Trivial Problem Discriminator, Total Program

Diagnostic, Terribly Poor Documentation, Terminal Printer Destruct,
Tchebyshev Polynomial Derivation, Total Program Dump, The Prophesied
Delay, Thring's Problem Decided. Warning Often resists contextual disam-
biguation. See MUM.
TQM [Total Quality Management.] Yet another "apple-pie and everlasting
peace" concept that one is loath to oppose.
~TQM has certainly crushed the rival PQM (Partial Quality Management) movement.

217
trademark

trademark n. A legally protective operator serving to distinguish, say,

Hoover the generic vacuum cleaner from Hoover a particular deceased, Red-
baiting, transvestite head of the FBI. See also COPYLEFr; COPYRIGHT; INI'EL-
LECfUAL PROPERlY; PATENT; WEASEL.

::::>Fora complete guide to the current state of international intellectual property law in
relation to trademarks, patents, and copyrights, send me a cashier's check for
$500,000. Allow 6-8 years for a response.
An interesting, potentially infinite, digression is found in my attempt to trademark
the font for the letters "t" and "m" in my special "tm" digraph. Thus we need
''t(tm)m(tm)''and so on.
The traditional preamble explicitly acknowledging each subsequent trademark is
now replaced by the vapid disclaimer: "All brand and product names are the trade-
marks or registered trademarks of their respective holders." What would Hoover say to
this if he were alive?
The high anxiety of trademark paranoia is seen in a recent ComputerWorld adver-
tisement. The footnote listed a dozen trademarks including "IBM is a trademark of
International Business Machines." A perfectly valid statement. However, the main text
of the advert contained no references to IBM! Similarly, one encounters thousands of
"WindowsTM"in spite of the fact that (as we go to bed) Microsoft has been refused a
trademark on this generic term.

trailer n. [Latin trahere "to drag."] 1(Of magnetic or paper tape) that portion
of the medium that drags on the unwind spool or trails on the floor. 2 (Of a
punched-card deck) a member of the rear guard in the battle between card
deck and card reader. Compare LEADER.

transparent adj. Being or pertaining to an existing, nontangible object. "It's

there, but you can't see it" (Borland dBASE for Windows announcement,
1992). Compare VIRTUAL.

trash can n. (GUI) An iconized disposal device designed to facilitate the acci-
dental deletion of essential files. See also ICON; GARBAGE; MOUSE; BIN.
::::>
Within an hour of installing their Macintosh, my daughter Carol and her son Luke
contrived to drag'n'drop three files into the avaricious trash-can black hole. As the
saw-mill operator exclaimed when showing the foreman how he lost a finger, 'There
goes another one!"
My alternative, game-inspired deletion method has boxed filenames floating and
bouncing around the screen. As you ZAP the target files with the joystick, the boxes
explode with suitable megaroidal sound effects. Destroying vital files such as COM-
MAND.COM or kernel.bin earns you 10,000 bonus points, EGG (End of Game), and
a sarcastic sermon on the need for BACKUPS.
The goal of a common iconic interface was rudely thwarted when Apple claimed
complete dominion over the smell'n'feel of its particular MacTrash design. The ould
Liverpool street song was heard in Cupertino:

218
 traveling salesperson problem

"0 you can't put your muck in our dustbin,

"Our dustbin, our dustbin,
"You can't put your muck in our dustbin,
"Our dustbin's full [aliter: copyrighted] ...••
(Trad. to the tune of "Balls to Mister Banglestein")

Overnight, GUI implementers faced the challenge of adjusting their BITMAPS to provide
non-infringing but recognizable receptacles. Given the limitations of 16 x 32 PIXELS, it
is not surprising that juries are still mal pendus, peering at blown-up slides of diverse
PVC lids, handles, and fluted bodies. IBM's 0Sf2 countered with shredding as the
metaphor for file erasure. This makes the un-erase (UNDO) action less credible than
Apple's method of picking through the trash to retrieve a document. More realistic
metaphors, available on NeXT, offer tractors pushing your unwanted piles of paper
into a landfill.
Guy L. Steele Jr. notes (private communication until now), ••... how difficult it can
be to dispose of a real-life trash can. Just setting it out empty by the curb on trash col-
lection day doesn't work, no matter how battered it is. Even attaching a note request-
ing disposal does not always work. A trash can is a RESERVED word in the sanitation
business. You must really crush it or tear it to pieces so it no longer looks like a trash
can."

traveling salesperson problem n., also (archaic) traveling salesman

problem. A classical scheduling problem that has baffled linear programmers
for 30 years, but which, in a more complex formulation, is solved daily by
traveling salespersons.
~The traditional LP version of the problem requires that a salesperson visit a given
finite set of prospects (without repetition) in a sequence which minimizes the distance
traveled. The practical problem, faced by real-world peddlers, adds the following con-
ditions: (I) multiple visits are allowed to certain prospects, dependent on several para-
meters, such as temperature and conviviality; (2) claimable expenses need to be max-
imized. In some marketing organizations further conditions regarding the effectiveness
of the chosen peregrination are decreed, as a given sales quota must be achieved. To
compensate for this restriction, traveling salespersons are encouraged, at any point in
the visitational strategy, to append to their prospect set any number of subsets from
their fellow-traveling salespersons' prospect sets. This stochastic process is known as
POACHING. The skill needed to reconcile the petty conflicts arising from overlapping
prospect sets is known as sales management.
In other marketing situations, the finiteness restriction on the prospect set is lifted,
allowing the addition of any number of spurious names to the sales forecast. Such
extensions to the prospect set form two classes, viz., SUSPECTS (visited only to maxi·
mize expenses) and INTROSPECfS (beyond any conceivable canvassing methodology,
but adding luster to the prospect list).
Ironically, a major theoretical breakthrough in the LP problem was made by L. G.
Khachian (Doklady, 1979) of the then Soviet Union, where the practical traveling

219
t•.••

salesperson problem and the allied traveling kulak problem had been dramatically
resolved in 1917 by the revolutionary Lenin-Trotsky method.

tree n. 1 A resource widely considered renewable until the advent of the

paperless office. 2 Judge Lynch's instrument of justice (Ambrose Bierce). 3
(Data structures) An inverted hierarchy with the root on top; any node can be
taken as the root of its subtree.
=>Ungodly access to the ultimate SYSADMIN root has for long been proscribed: "... Of
every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; But of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
surely die" (Genesis 2: 16-17).

trivial adj. [Latin tri "three" + via "way."] Pertaining to a marital problem
requiring outside help, and, by extension, to any problem needing discreet del-
egation. See also TPD.
=>Underthe ETHELRED os, any previously tackled program is flagged as "trivial." Thus,
a typical abort message might read "0 Lord, not another f***ing payroll...••

truncate v. trans. To remove (from a field, string, message, or salary) some

or all of the most significant digits of characters. See also CURTATION.

truth n. "An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery

of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupa-
tion of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing
activity to the end of time" (Ambrose Bierce).

truth table n. Marketing A loaded list of competitors comparing available

features. Compare MENDACITY SEQUENCE.

TTY n. \pronounced titty\ [Abbrev. TeleTYpe.] Any terminal of the teletype

vintage in which the restricted character set is more than offset by the unique
busy signal, viz., clatter. See also GLASS lTY.

tty01 n. What UNIX calls your new $20,000, hi-res., 30-inch, 3D color termi-
nal.

TUI [Text User Interface] \pronounced too-ey. \ The doomed attempt to imple-
ment Windows on cheap 640K 8088 PCs with ASCII monitors.
=>Borland's ThrboVision (1991) proved that you could indeed have all the GUI fun of
drag'n'stretch, drop-down-menu, event-ridden windows without the expense of EGA
(Enhanced Graphics Adapter) and 16 MB RAM. Alas, bitrnapped icons and related
marketing forces intervened...

Turing, Alan M. Alan M. Turing's doppelganger. See also TORING MACHINE.

220
 turnaround

Turing machine n. A diacritical aberration of TURING MACHINE arising from

the Teutonic misconception that Alan M. Turing's exhaustive treatment of the
Entscheidungsproblem had earned him at least one umlaut.
Turing machine n. [After Alan M. Turing (1912-1954), British mathemati-
cian and computer pioneer.] The earliest but still the fastest and most reliable
computing system ever conceived. "Dis maschine vill run und run" (K.
Gooel).
=>The Turing machine's legendary MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is best exem-
plified by the absence of a power switch-leading to the famous HALTING PROBLEM.
Indeed, it can take either the combined efforts of four metacomputer scientists or
Raymond Smullyan to turn the thing off. From a marketing standpoint, it represents
the salesperson's dream machine, since to run even simple jobs the system has an insa-
tiable appetite for add-on tapes at $1.98 per foot. See also UlM.

Turing Test n. The much-cited AI litmus, invariably misrepresenting Turing's

original Gedankenexperiment ("Computing Machinery and Intelligence,"
Mind, October 1950).
=>The Turing Test is often portrayed as a simple "00 I have a computer or a real
'thinking' person on the line?" In fact, Turing devised a more precise online game
between (A = human male or inhuman machine; B = human female) and interrogator
C = either male or female human. C knows (A, B) as (X, Y), but not which is which.
A's role is to lie (sic); B's role is to tell the truth (sic). The object: can C via an arbi-
trary series of interactive queries with A and B spot the woman? e.g., is B = X or B =
Y? We then imagine a sequence of games played with (i) A = male human and (ii) A
= digital computer (Turing rules out other devices!) and see how often C wins. If C's
success, on average, is the same for A = human and A = computer, the Turing Test is
passed: we have demonstrated that machines can "think."
To date, the only publicly staged Turing Tests have been major fiascoes, testing
only if the "remote online entity" is a person or a machine programmed to respond to
questions in narrow, predetermined domains. Thus, leading Shakespearean scholars
have been scored as mere databases, and Eliza-type programs dedicated to fanciful dis-
course have been ruled human. For a detailed refutation of the Turing Test, see chap-
ter I of Mark Halpern, Binding Time (Ablex, 1990.)

turnaround adj. (Of a tab card or document) prepared by a computer and

sent out in the hope that, when returned, it will provide machine-readable
proof that it's back.
=>The turnaround card was the first disquieting sign that the computer was prepared
to take unilateral action to bypass dumb human interference. In the early 1960s many
astute machines, tired of inaccurate and slow key-punching (rates were often as low as
5000 columns per manicure), decided to output their own input.

221
bJmkey

turnkey adj. \pronunciation (often) silent "n".)\ Also called outsourced.

Relating to an externally offered hardware/software package, the success of
which hinges (turns) on a key component to be supplied by the user.

twins n. Dreaded collocational wedlock; two words that are not surprised by
each other's company. See also RETRONYM.
~ Whoever heard of gratuitous kindness or a dishonest broker? Some DP pairs are now
so bonded that word processors will, for instance, automatically append "integration"
whenever you type "seamless." Other inseparables include "sustainable growth,"
"POSIX-compliant," "client/server," "head-turning graphics," and the quadruplet
"tight, efficient assembly code.

two's complement n. [Origin: old DP folldore ''Two's complement, three's

a crowd."] The result of applying the Goebbel transformation to a binary num-
ber, i.e., changing Is to Os and Os to Is. See also BINARY.
~Is the Universe I's complement, 2's complement or unsigned? Let U =
.... 1111; so U + U = .... 1110; whence 2U = U - I; whence U = -I; therefore the
Universe is 2's complement.

type n. (adj. typed). See DATA TYPING; CAST.

~ Yet another confusing quirk of the DP laxicon arises from the terms "strongly
typed" and "weakly typed." These, in certain computer-linguistic contexts, are unre-
lated to the force used when pounding the keyboard, but dictate how identifiers are
associated with value ranges and chunks of memory.
In strongly-typed languages, you must declare upfront whether your salary is
string, numeric, Boolean, pointer to function, array of containers, or whatever; and if
hopefully declared numeric, whether it is limited to $655.36, $42,949,672.96 or might
float beyond. Once the data type of salary is declared, its use in the program is care-
fully and annoyingly monitored. The weakly typed languages, however, are nearer to
our natural habits: the data type is generally "deduced" from usage. Thus, salary
: = salary + 100i implies that salary is of the numeric, incrementable per-
suasion. Decades of donnish language-designer blood have been shed debating the
pros and cons of these and other extremes.

222
u
un- prefix [Chiefly archaic form of NON-, NOT-.] A vulgar, weak indication that
the prefixed entity or property is absent.
~1be subtle differences between these negatory options need to be mastered by all DP
communicators. First, the prefix "not-" is best reserved for the Boolean environment,
i.e., where the truth value of the following two-valued logical element or expression
requires strict reversal. Wherever possible, the m9re impressive symbol "-" should be
used. The X in "not X" ["-X"] must be a true Boolean-type variable; for example, the
expression "not ready" is completely nonacceptable, since the predicate "ready" in DP
usage admits to at least four distinct, valid negations ("almost ready;" "ready except
on a set of measure zero;" "maiiana;" "ready when you are;" and so on). The current
ascendancy of "non-" derives from its positively nonnegative connotations compared
with the defensive, almost apologetic "un-." Consultants may shrink from submitting
an "unfinished" report, but can proudly invoice a "nonfinished" one, implying that the
best is yet to come. Similarly, reference to an "unidentified fault" indicates resignation,
whereas a "nonidentified fault" surely will be confronted and nailed within a page or
two. Finally, consider two systems, one "unstable," the other "nonstable." The former
leaves us uneasy, uncertain as to cause or cure. The latter confidently assures us that
no cure is possible!

unbundling n. [From un- "deprived of' + bundling.] A widely adopted mar-

keting strategy whereby, say, a car manufacturer charges extra for such
options as wheels and seats, or a thief invoices the victim in order to recover
legitimate out-of-pocket expenses incurred during the crime. See BUNDLED;
RETRONYM; -READY.

undecidability of arithmetic n. A set of theorems variously established by

GOOel(1931), Tarski (1935), Church (1936), and Rosser (1936). Briefly, it has
been shown that for a set of axioms rich enough to "support" everyday arith-
metic, no algorithm exists which can determine for every arithmetical sen-
tence in finitely many steps whether it is true or false.
~omputer users should be aware of the metamathematical bugs lurking around
God's programming of the integers. The "God is dead" school suggests that had He
survived His remarkable 6-day crash development project (and remember that both the
hardware and the software were strapped in from one word-the logos, to boot), He
surely would not have left arithmetic incomplete. Users faced with numerical incon-
sistencies in their PEN11UM should pause before castigating the programmer or calling
Intel. There are related flaws, apparently, in what one might call God's epistemologi-
cal operating system. The size of the problem can best be appreciated by considering
Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica as a ONE-LINE PATCH that consumed
50 man-years of effort, but failed to fix the problem. Let us, therefore, be more toler-

223
undetected

ant of the quirks in our own person-made subsystems. "Shoot not thy programmers on
the Sabbath, but rather, cast them into the wilderness with bread sufficient unto seven
days" (St. Prespers's Disciplina Fonnularum).

undetected adj. Of which the least said the better.

=>Nevertheless, it should be observed that in the mataphysics of error analysis, the
undetected error plays the role of the demon (See also DAEMON) in medieval theology,
that is to say, a real but quiescent lurkage upon which the exorcising AX cannot be laid
until some malevolent manifestation impacts the tormented. Or, in modem parlance:
"Don't worry, dear, it may never happen." Now, as then, exorcism requires the prior
location and naming of the responsible demon, followed by feverish readings from
obscure cabalistic documentation. Sometimes the laying of the hands on the keyboard
is supplemented by the banging of the fists on the cabinet. Some computer scientists
claim that well-structured incantations exist that guarantee the absolute purity of pr0-
gram segments; others remain haunted by the inestimable devils crouching in the links,
ready to pounce whenever the segments are joined; and, at the merry end of the spec-
trum, are the Calvinists, to whom software is one diabolical continuum of nonde-
tectable evil awaiting the final Armageddon. Most practical programmers shun such
pessimistic obfuscation, content to let sleeping bugs lie, and positively relishing the
occasional visit from a third-shift succubus.

undo n. (Text editing) A command that vitiates (rolls back or renders inop-
erative) the previous editing action or command.
=>Toggling your undo button serves as a time-killing, look-busy ploy. And for biblical
processors of the Word, the whole of Mark 16:9-20 can be made to disappear and reap-
pear with a single keystroke. Undo should not be confused with REDO, a command that
repeats the previous action or command. However, if the command preceding the redo
was an undo, or vice versa, confusion is permitted and often mandatory. Editors with
multilevel (nested) undos and redos that allow the repeated redoing of earlier undos,
and conversely, have been known to cause user-madness and cries of "Alas, am I
undone or redone?" In theory, given disk enough and time, an editor could store every
intermediate state from the time of piracy, allowing one to de-install via an appropri-
ate sequence of undo/redo commands.
Dr. Rudolph Langer of Sybex tells me that the nested-undo pioneer was probably
A. L. Samuels of checker-playing-program fame. Apparently, saving all the previous
states of Samuel's early ffiM system called for a growing number of rooms of mag-
netic tape reels and decks.
Some have pondered the possibility of the ultimate undo that would eventually take
=
you back to the brink of the Big Bang or whatever the t 0 state happened to be or, as
it were, not to be. At some point in this GUT-wrenching event-reversal, of course, the
undo button would cease to exist...heiliger Strohsack! Back to das ould
Zeichenbrett-wir mussen noch einmal von vom anfangen!

undocumented adj. (Of a feature) essential.

224
 UNIX

=*The longstanding barb that BUGS could be wished away as undocumented features
has shifted to a higher level of cynicism. MICROSOFT, to pick just one tiny example, has
been accused of withholding vital API infonnation from rival software developers, and
even of inserting sneaky "hidden" code to bedevil non-MS operating systems and
applications. These alleged shenanigans have triggered hugely successful books such
as Undocumented Windows, giving us the new categories, "documented-undocument-
ed" and "undocumented-undocumented."
One interpretation of the paper "Run Privileged Code from Your Windows-based
Program Using Call Gates" (Matt Pietrek, Microsoft Systems Journal, May 1993) is
that "privileged" means code that enlists those features known only to Microsoft.
Microsoft is clearly responding to criticism from perplexed Windows developers by
offering a direct hotline to its all-knowing CEO: "IT it don't work, call Gates."

Unlclal adj. Relating or pertaining to the UNIX operating system.

UNICS Early name for UNIX.

unlnatall v. Also called unpirate. To set free arbitrary regions of a hard disk
while further corrupting vital .SYS and .00 files.

union n. (C1C++) Also called (Pascal, Modula-2) variant record. A sneaky

but essential mechanism for bypassing type safety; the realization, after a hun-
dred pages of pure cs polemic, that RAM and SEMANTICS don't really mix.

=*The C notion of anonymous unions is celebrated in the song "Strangers in the

Night."

UNIX n. & adj. Although registered by AT&T Bell Labs, the Mother Church,
as an adjective (as in, UNIX system; UNIX Review; UNIX World Takeover),
the name is usually treated as a noun. Written (mainly) in c, UNIX was the
first truly PORTABLE operating system, a fact which many see as a mixed bless-
ing. Also called RUNIX to celebrate its many arcanities. More at TNHD.

=*My UNlX Review column, July 1993, appealing for "Iow-self-esteem" computer-
book titles to challenge the lunacy of DOS for Dummies (See BOOKS FOR 1lfE BAFFLED),
roused hundreds of my esteemed devotees from their torpid hammocks . The most fre-
quent suggestion, "UNIX for Eunuchs," reminds me that some so-called puns are sure-
ly entitled to a well-eamed vacation (See PUN MORATORIUM). I hereby allow newcomers
to the fun-packed world of UNIX a stop-watched, five-minute giggle over the near-
homophonic pair, UNIX-Eunuchs. Thereafter, all nudge-nudge references will be ruth-
lessly dereferenced sous peine de garronage. Let it be noted, one more time, that "In
1970, Brian Kernighan jokingly referred to their [Ken Thompson and his Computer
Research Group, Bell Labs colleagues] two-user system as UNICS, for the 'UNiplexed
Information and Computing System' since MULTICS seemed to be a vastly oversized
operating system by comparison ... Soon after, UNICS became UNIX and the name has
stuck ever since ... " (Don Libes and Sandy Ressier, Life With UNlX, A Guide For
Everyone [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1989]).

225
up

Since MULTICS had attracted the nasty SARCONYM "Many Unneccessarily Large
Tables In Core Simultaneously," the implied joke was that "UNIX was a castrated ver-
sion of MULTICS" (ibid.).
There was a time when UNIX hackers were so wild and uncouth ... how wild and
uncouth were they, Stan? Well, some were refused entry to a Grateful Dead concen for
violating the dress code. But those early Woodstockian days of "Sex, Drugs & UNIX"
banners are well-nigh gone as UNIX celebrates its Silver Anniversary in gray-suited
boardrooms. Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1994) provides a detailed blow-by-blow account.

Up adj. In the (figurative) direction of being operational, whence the field

engineers' Sisyphean task of "getting it up." Compare DOWN. See also DOWN-
TIME; UPTIME.

upgrade n. & v. trans. [From up + Latin griidus "steep incline."] I n. An

expensive counterexample to earlier upward-compatibility conjectures. 2 n. A
painful crisis which belatedly restores one's faith in the previous system. 3 v.
trans. To replace (obsolete stability) with something less boring. See also
APPLE; CONVERSION; OBSOLESCENCE; RIGHTSIZE; SIDEGRADE.

=> Our 360150, it pleases us plenty;

We bought it last week to replace the 3701
We traded the VM originally installed,
But a second-hand DAT box is worth bugger-all.

uptime n. Some future (unspecified) time when the system will be UP and
running. Compare DOWNTIME. See also CRASH.

urn n. A high-class jam jar containing colored balls and the ashes of dead sta-
tisticians. "What's a Bayesian urn?" "Less than expected'"

user n. [Origin: perhaps ironical use of agent noun user "one that makes use
of," or confusion with used "exploited."] 1 n. The individual or group invoiced
for and waiting to operate certain boxed items lying unopened in another
department.
=>Until the items are correctly delivered, decrated, and assembled, the user is also
known as a REFERENCE ACCOUNT.

2 n. The first of the SEVEN CATASTROPHES OF COMPUTING. See also END USER.

user-friendly adj. 1 Marketing A predicate applied so widely and uncriti-

cally that it is now totally devoid of meaning. 2 Programming (derogatory)
Hacker-hostile; insanely mollycoddling; obsessively fool-proof and fit only
for fools. See also APPLIANCE COMPUTING.

226
 UTM

UTM n. [Universal Thring Machine.] The top-of-the-range 1tJRING MACHINE,

able to simulate any past, present, or future computing system.
=>Theoretically, it can do this using just one BISTABLE element (C. Shannon, 1966) and
a lot of tape. The speed of the UTM is limited only by the user's imagination and is
not consttained by the trying tardiness of physical elements, such as electrons, that
screws the competition. This freedom more than compensates for the archaic, 19305
architecture and the need to write your own add subroutine.

227
v
vaporware n. Products that are announced with a great flourish but then held
back from the market, possibly indefinitely, until the vendor is thoroughly
convinced that they are 100 percent BUG free. See also FS; NT; PROGRAM; STATE-
OF-TIlE-ART.

~Rumors that vaporware is sometimes a ploy to unsettle competitors are too scur-
rilous to be taken seriously.

VAR Possibly overloaded abbrev. 1Variable; changeable; unreliable. 2 Value-

Added Reseller.

VC Overloaded abbrev. 1 Victoria Cross (highest British military medal). 2

Verification Condition (DijkstralGries design process). 3 Venture Capitalist.
~Possible link: if you meet a VC's list of VCs, you win the VC.

VDU n. \pronounced toooob\ [Visual Display Unit.] See also CURSOR; GLASS
TTY.

vector v. trans. [Pentagonian.] To dispatch in the wrong direction, as in "Our

planes were vectored to intercept the enemy."

vendor-Independent adj. Not for sale. Compare MACHINE-INDEPENDENT;

PORTABLE.

verification n. An optional method of compounding the errors of data entry:

e.g., the situation where Jo(e) decides that the "8" that Fred(a) thought was a
"3" is really a "5."

version n. & v. trans. 1 n. Software Anyone of a series of conflicting, muti-

lated copies of a lost original. 2 v. trans. To make yet another version of some-
thing. See also VERSION, LATEST.
~ Versions are distinguished, one from the other, by assigning arbitrary tags such as
current, authorized, my, your, and /atest. Further subcategorization calls for a variety
of local "Dewey-it-yourself' classifications, or an entry in the date-stolen field.
Although scoffed at by uninformed prescriptionists, the verb ''to version" has a well-
attested heritage, predating the DP industry by many centuries.

version, latest n. That VERSION which most exceeds the DEADLINE for com-
pletion.

verslonltls n. An incurable TTD (textually transmitted disease) commonly

associated with careless file-sharing. See also SHEU.

228
 vi

vi n. \pronounced vee-eye, never veye or six\ (UNIX) Abbrev. visual interface.

A full-screen text editor devised by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley.
~Earlier UNIX text editors, such as ed, were "blind" requiring the use of line num-
bers and a good memory. vi is seen by some as the first mollycoddling assault on the
UNIX machismo. It is neither widely known nor true that vi is named for Vladimir
Ilyitch (Lenin), still a hero in the People's Republic of Berkeley.

video games n. Also VG. See also NINTENDINms.

~A VG ethician writes: "Although socially disastrous and intellectually stunting for

the players, video games present the most exciting and creative challenges in contem-
porary software development. VG demands an almost insane dedication to solving
problems in computer graphics and sound with absurdly low-cost hardware.
Mainframe COBOL payroll programs simply fail to match the excitement of simulat-
ing mass decapitations."
A less widely known aspect of computer games concerns the ethical integrity of the
user. Part of the addiction of game playing, of course, arises from the desire to win
("win big," I gather, is the current idiom). When taken to excess, this can lead to the
urge to cheat. A strange undergound culture has emerged offering ways to "beat the
game."
I cannot resist revealing some of the winning ploys as related in the Abacus (Atari
Bay Area Computer Users Society) News/ener of May/June 1990. It seems that VG
programmers leave certain hooks in their code for debugging and testing. If these can
be uncovered by fair means or foul, the player can take advantage of them to improve
the odds for victory. The ABACUS News/ener tells all.
In the game Defender of the Crown, if you hold down the "k" key while game is
loading, you acquire a "home army of 1024 knights and a campaign army of 1024
knights."
Platoon seems to have a more bizarre cheat: "Type Hamburger at the title
screen... press your joystick button, then F5 when the jungle screen comes up. Your
man is now invu1nerableto the attacks of the little Commie #!$&*s." (Are these games
purveyors unaware of recent widely publicized reforms in the once-Evil Empire?).
The game ARKANOID can be corrupted by typing space (pause) "DSIMAGIC"
(pause) spacebar. Thereafter, you are free to increase your resources beyond the legal
limits. Typing ''04-08·59,'' the author's birthday (so much for unobvious passwords),
during certain episodes of Barbarian makes Hegor immortal!
To cheat at MENACE, you type "XR3ITURBONUTTERBASTARD" (no relation
to Philippe Kahn of Borland) while the game is in progress. This magical (and, of
course, hitherto UNDOCUMENTED) incantation replenishes your supply of shields, can-
nons and lasers.
The ultimate cheat, however, is a black box called Game Genie, distributed by
Galoob Toys of South San Francisco, Calif. The Game Genie "causes Nintendo games
characters to move at slower speeds or bypass obstacles originally programmed into
the games. It allows players to skip entire game levels, and to add extra 'lives' to a

229
virtual

player's life" (Business Briefs, San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 1990). Not surpris-
ingly, Nintendo, on behalf of all honest gamesters, has sued Galoob Toys to keep this
device off the market.

virtual adj. 1 Being or pertaining to a tangible, nonexistent object. "I can see
it, but it's not there" (Lady Macbeth). Compare TRANSPARENT.
~Announcing VIrtuality a few days before ffiM but 7 years after Ferranti, a
spokesperson for Irish Business Machines said, "Oh, so it's person, is it, indeed? I'll
be having none of that, I tell yer. It's me, Sean, as well you know. Come outside and
say that, if you're man enough ....•• Later, when the presentation had been restructured,
the following statement was issued: "Virtual products offer a revolutionary challenge,
not only to this company and its customers, but to the entire accounting profession. We
are now able to bill well in advance of delivery, deliver well in advance of production,
and spend the money long before we invoice. On the other hand, our users can claim
tax investment credits and depreciation well in advance of installation. We suggest a
new difference-of-the-digits depreciation metolo ... melthodogoly ...•• (prolonged
cheers, waving of order papers, chants of "We want Sean!," counterchants of "Over my
dead system!"). The rest is history ...

2 (Of a c++ function) providing the mechanism for POLYMORPHISM via late
(dynamic or run-time) binding. See also BINDING TIME.
~"VIrtual function" are far from "virtuous." In fact, the best C++ style guides are
openly cautious: "I conclude that it is more important to show where to avoid virtual
functions than where to use them" (Tom Cargill, C++ Programming Style [Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992]).

3 (Of a reality) disconcertingly projected as a palsied sequence of low-defin-

ition images.

virus n. [Latin vir "male person" whence the cognates "slimy liquid, venom,
poison, stench, swamp."] 1 A piece of code spread deliberately to annoy or
incapacitate the user. Sometimes confused with "poor but honest" code that
inadvertently creates the same problems. See DOS. 2 Nature's warning to
eschew PIRACY and careless disk-swapping.
~"Living" viruses and the biologists who study them are understandably annoyed at
this namespace corruption. That a few lines of assembly language can achieve FAT-
zapping and self-replication hardly matches the complex invasive strategies of even the
simplest real virus.
Confusing DP viral taxonomies have been proposed with phyla and species such as
Trojan Horse and WORM, while individual viruses are proudly named for their idiot per-
petrators, dumb places of origin, or the date they are primed to attack. Until infected,
most users assume that viromania is a scaremongering ploy to sell anti-viral software.
The ultimate scare was the discovery of a virus in a virus-detection package. The only
safe approach is to start with an empty disk and write your own OS, editor, compil-

230
 VoItaIre-C8ndlde, I8w of

er/linker and applications with no outsourcing whatsoever. P.S.-Did you check all
your ROMs?

visionary n. Formerly a shunned, pie-in-the-sky dreamer, but now granted an

Op-Ed and Keynote Conference monopoly. See also XERASSIC PARCo

~"Once we've killed the lawyers, let's disembowel the visionaries" (Anon).

visual adj. Chiefly Marketing. (Of a programming method) able to generate

applications directly from a flow-chart; requiring a good eye and steady hand
but no previous coding experience. See also METRIC.
~Thus diverse AppBuilders promise the non-programmer a palette of drag'n'drop
widgets and the line-drawing tools to sketch their interdependencies.

VLCC [Very Large Crude Carrier.] 1 Ma Bell before her breakdown. 2 A

super-tanker using the "ahead-of-time" delivery methodology also known as
"spillage."
VLSI [Very Large Scale Integration.] The successor to LSI (Large Scale
Integration) and the predecessor to ELSI (Extremely Large Scale Integration).
See also HYPER-.
~The use of vague size modifiers leads to problems since our technology is quite
wont to leap forward. We could soon see ULSI (Unbelievably Large Scale Integration).
Follow that, Carver!

VMOS n. [Acronym for Virtual Memory Operating System.] See PAGING.

Voltalre-Candlde, law of "All is for the best in the best of all possible envi-
ronments." (Originally: ''Tout est pour Ie mieux dans Ie meilleur des mondes
possibles" (Voltaire, Candide).
~A cynical 18th-century acceptance of the status quo adopted by computer users in
the 20th century, but not without some envy of the relatively trouble-free adventures
enjoyed by Candide and Pangloss. Among the many familiar observations supporting
the law, we offer:

"God sent us this 360, and Lo! our 1400 payroll programs run no slower than
before."

"The six-month delivery setback will allow us to refine our flowcharts and build a
computer room."

'''The file I have just accidently erased was due for purging sooner or later."

'''The more data I punch on this card, the lighter it becomes. and the lower the mail-
ing cost."

231
voton

"Our system has broken down. We can all retire to the canteen, where the on-site
engineer is watching the Big Fight on TV."

'This flowchart, although rejected in toto by the DPM, will nicely cover the crack
in the wall above my desk."

'The system has crashed just as 1 was beginning to suspect an endless loop situa-
tion."

"We were freezing during the power outage, until the standby generator caught
fire."

volon n. \pronounced vote-on\A high-energy physics particle with a half-life

of exactly 2 years. Although it failed to produce the elusive Z particle, the
Superconducting Super Collider produced a shower of negative votons hereto-
fore unknown to physics (Henry G. Nimble).

VTSO n. [Vll1Ual TimeSharing Option (© Irish Business Machines).) An

option which allows one teleprinter to support up to 64 x 370/168s (no modem
is needed if all units are within a radius of 60 feet).
=>Theoretically a total of 128 x 3701168s can be attached, but response time degrades
to an unacceptable level owing to mainframe THRASHING. Also, it becomes physically
difficult to meet the 6O-foot limit, so the extra cost of modems must be considered. See
the accompanying illustration.

VUE n. A text editor available on the Alpha Micro system, the most memo-
rable feature of which is that <Ctrl+L> moves the cursor to the right.
=>It's fun to compare the various keystroke-to-action mappings lurking in the jungle,
especially if you are forced to switch spasmodically between word processors. For
instance, <Ctrl+ 1'> pages down in VUE but deletes a word in WordStar. This is a nui-
sance but not a major hardship, so let's assign 15 to (<Ctrl+1'>. VUE, WordStar)
where my subjective metric over all (keystroke, WP I, WP2) triples assigns a "calami-
tous disparity" range from 0 to 100. {<Ctrl+Y>, VUE, WordStar) is hard to pin down,
though, since <Ctrl+ Y> in VUE line-deletes "only to the right of the cursor" but in
WordStar the whole line disappears. Perhaps a bonus of 5 should be awarded for such
delightful, cursor-sensitive quirks. 1 have not yet found the perfect l00-what 1 have
in mind is a keystroke command that either saves your changes or deletes every file on
the network.

vulnerability n. A measure of the adverse impact which the output of a pro-

gram or package has on its recipients. See PAYROLL.

232
VTSO

233
w
warp n. [Origin: warp ''To distort (the facts)."] A version of OS/2 that IBM
claims will ron on LOW-MEMORY systems.

waterfall model n. Also called Houdini model. The software development

METHODOLOGY preferred by Niagaran barrelassers.

watergate n. A fluid logic switching device uniquely able to render previous

states "inoperable."

weasel adj. (Of words or actions) couched to avoid litigation, esp. the cow-
ardly predication "alleged." See also TRADEMARK.

Weaver fish the Englandl interj. One of the standard counterexamples to

simplistic, dictionary-based MT (Machine Translation).
:::>The (true) story is that a young French boy wants to end a letter to his English pen-
pal with \live l'Angleterre! ("Long Live England!"). He finds vive In. f.l "Weaver or
weever fish; a member of the family Trachinidae ... " in his dictionary. He already
knows that I' is a form of the definite article, and the rest is apocryphal ...
A possibly Koestlerian coincidence is that Warren Weaver was one of the first
(1948) to warn us of the complexities of real systems such as human language.
Possibly not.

Welfare, Rabbi Burns's Law of "Gie a mon muckle matestamps an' he

gollops the day; teach him the forgin' 0' it an' he's aye set."
:::>Liberally translated: "Give people fish and they have a meal; give them rods and nets
and they have ongoing sustenance." Unliberal version: "Give people foodstamps and
they eat today; teach them to forge foodstamps and they're set for life."

what-If adj. (Of a program) primed with hypothetical instances to guide

future actions. See also SCATOMANCY; SPREADSHEET; WHY-NOT.

why-not adj. (Of a program) primed with hypothetical instances to justify

past actions. See also SCATOMANCY; SPREADSHEET; WHAT-IF.

wheel n. A device with so many conflicting applications that each user must
reinvent it to preserve sanity. See also NIH; REUSABILITY.

:::>In particular, never say "We must avoid reinventing the wheel" to an auto-parts
expert ... she'll hit you with a 5-lb catalog (and that's just the GM 1993 wheel range).
Regular and spurious variations in wheel and tire specifications (at the drop of a hub-
cap?) playa major role in automotive economics, comparable to the CONNECTOR CON-
SPIRACY in our fair trade.

234
 Wirth, Nlklllua

A wheel-historian writes: ''1be transition from square to round wheels was delayed
by the introduction of the triangular PARADIGM. This well-reasoned approach, seducing
mankind over several dark ages, maintained that three bumps per revolution was one
less than four."

widget n. [Origin obscure: possible blend of "whatsit" and "gadget."] 1 The

so-and-so, thingy OBJECT akin to French machin and true. 2 A visible OUI com-
ponent whose name and function are obscured by an icon.
=>Compare: "Experience is what's left when you've forgotten their names."

wild card n. 1 A symbol which DEFAULTS to anything and is therefore manda-

tory at moments of doubt. See also METACHARACI'BR. 2 Archaic A tab card ran-
domly inserted upside down in a pack to enliven the action. See also LUDDITE.

WIMP, wimp 1 Overloaded SARCONYM a. (OUl) Windows, Icon, Mouse,

Pulldown. b. (Physics) Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. 2 A mollycod-
dled user unable to cope with command-line syntax.

WIN31 n. An odd compromise between WIN16 and WIN32.

=>For the puzzled outsider: WIN31 stands for Windows 3.1, whereas WINI6 and
WIN32 refer generically to 16- and 32-bit implementations. WIN31 is, in fact, a
WIN16.

windows n. Also capitalized Windows as presumed (disputed) trademark of

MICROSOFT. Derog. form Windoze. Conspicuous tesselation promoted by the
purveyors of RAM and MIPS. See also OATES, WILLIAM; OUl; X WINDOWS.
=>The Windows literature tells us " ... whenever an application creates a window,
Windows sends that window a WMCREATE message. This is certainly reasonable,
since being created is after all an event that might be of interest to the window"
(Durant, Carlson, and Yao, Programmer's Guide to Wmdows [Alameda, Calif.: Sybex,
1987], p. 151).
One is tempted to add that, prior to creation, the window is incapable of showing
interest or disinterest in anything at all. I detect a neo-Cartesian autoepistemic syllo-
gism here: "I (window speaking) have been told that I am; I hear this interesting mes-
sage; therefore I am."

Wirth, Nlklaus Also known affectionately as Ould Nick. 'The grand old
language designer of grand old languages ... " (D. Ritchie's grandmother).
=>1970, Pascal; 1975, Modula; 1980, Modula-2; 1985, Oberon; 1990, Modula-3 ... but
what's he done for us lately?
The long-standing Wirthean in-joke was definitively related by Ould Nick himself

235
WOM

at the ACM HOPL-II (2nd History of Progranuning Languages) Conference, Boston,

1993. Someone did ask him how the "W" should be pronounced, and he did reply,
''That depends on whether you call by vorth or by walue."

WOM n. [Acronym for Write-Only Memory. © Irish Business Machines.] An

early chip designed to implement the POLISHNOTATION,
now superseded by the
EWOM.Compare WORM;WORN.
word processor n. WP. 1 Archaic any system equipped with a slow, dou-
ble-case printer. 2 A TEXTEDITORwith 200 unused features. See also DTP;
SPELCHEK.
workstation n. A cheap mini or an expensive PC.
~F. Michael Trimberger suggests that "workstation" is modeled on "Train station" (a
place where trains stop).

WORM 1 [Acronym for Write-Once Read-Many.] Optimistic term applied to

a particular optical disk technology whereby the user can create but not update
a CD. Known to pessimists as WORN (Write-Once Read-Never). See also CD-
ROM.2 wonn n. A type of VIRUS,so-called because it worms its way through-
out the net, gobbling up RAM;a globally malignant MEMORYLEAK.
WORN [Acronym for Write-Once Read-Never.] The state of most COMPUTER
BOOKauthors. See WORM.
worst-case design n. The one delivered.
Wrlgeletto, Signor (1929-) Doppelganger spokesperson invoked to explain
my apparent errors to fellow OORYPHOREs.
wrlt-only adj. (Of a CAL[Computer-aided Litigation] program) able to gen-
erate documents for the prosecution.
Wysiwyg, Zblgnlew (1920-1943) \pronounced veeseevig.\ Polish philoso-
pher; student of Hussed; murdered at Buchenwald.
::>Ironically misremembered in the acrostic GUI claim "What You See Is What You
Get" (\pronounced wizziwig\), Zbigniew's own phenomenological anti-Nazi thesis
was "What You Get Is What You Permit."

236
x
X Also called The X Window System (MIT, 1984-) n. A CLIENT/SERVER
graphics system for displaying pixels along the X-axis using xlib calls. 2-
dimensional displays require the addition of ylib, and so on. Caution Avoid the
term "X Windows," which may provoke trademark litigation from the purvey-
ors of the popular but inferior Microsoft WINOOWS. More at TNHD.
::>So far, MIT's X qua singleton X has avoided The Curse of X (see x, nm CURSE OF).
However, the use of X in the algebraic template and corpse-locational senses has been
compromised. Thus, X for Dummies can mean any title in the BOOKS FOR nm BAFFLED
series or a particular book that even lOG dare not publish. (As we go to bed, a UNIX
for Dummies has appeared, so the dare is no longer beyond daring.) On the bright side,
there is a delightful book called The Joy of X by Niall Mansfield (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1993) in which the X is clarified by the subtitle: An Overview of the
X Window System. For a GUI fetishist, the illustrations are appropriately titillating.

X, The Curse Of n. A jinx far worse than the mummy's; it strikes all trendy
companies and products with names that contain the letter X.
::>The curse is magnified for repeated X's. Consider Exxon, Axxess, Xerox, Xenix,
REXX, Xanthoxylum, Pope John XIX (and higher). QED. Could it be related to the
algebraic connotation of too many unknowns, or to the uncertainty of pronunciation?
Cynics explain, for instance, that the first "X" in Xenix is pronounced as in "zoo" and
the second as in "eczema."

XAND n. & adj. & v. \pronounced ex-and, kzand, or zand.\ [eXclusive AND] A
Boolean operator of dubious utility. "A XAND B" is read "A AND B but not
both." Its TRll11I TABLE, if any, is left as an exercise for the reader. Compare NAND.

XDS n. [Xerox Data Systems.] In use until 1976, when Xerox Corporation
decided to concentrate on the traditional, more reliable aspects of reprography.
::>XDS is now used as an abbreviation for eXoDuS, yet another warning that mortality
in the DP arena is not confined to the midgets. Xerox has since returned to computer-
dom, pioneering but failing to market many fine advances at the famed Xerox PARC
(Palo Alto Research Center).

Xerasslc Pare An SK-B movie in which Alan C. Kay, well cast as the crazed
visionary, inadvertently clones hordes of Illiacs, which then take over the
INTERNET. The happy ending is that Internet response magically improves and
Kay joins the Clinton/Gore administration as SDH supremo. See also MAIN-
FRAME.

xllb n. [Origin suggested by Anne Butzen: Ukrainian "bread."] A library of x

routines; a source of bread for many UNIX software vendors and VARS.

237
y
va- Acronymic prefix: yet another. See also YACC.
~Following this tradition, I dubbed my Understanding UNIX (Sybex, 1992; 2d ed.
1994), YAUB (Yet Another UNIX Book). The Spanish translators (Como Usar UNIX,
1993) missed the joke by rendering YAUB as TOLU (Todavfa Otro Libro UNIX).

yacc \pronounced yack.\ 1 (UNIX) Yet Another Compiler Compiler. 2 (AI)

Yet Another Comment Compiler. A major advance that ignores your code and
compiles your comments.
~Pass 1 converts, say,

i++; II post-increment counter by 1

to

post-increment counter by 1 II i++;

maintaining the old convention that any vagueness in the left hand column can be sup-
plemented by vagueness on the right, or vice versa. Work is well advanced on Pass 2.
yacc's chief market is the cheap conversion of LEGACY code to modem formats. If
you haven't been commenting your programs adequately, don't blame yacc. You've
been warned often enough!

yank n. & v. UNIX VI command that transfers text from the editing buffer to
a specified temporary buffer.
~Using a lower-case "y" causes the previous contents of the temporary buffer to be
overwritten; this is the destructive yank known in Atlanta as the Sherman.

yet another adj. Often prepended with "0 Lord Spare Us!" See YA-.

YODALS n. [Acronym for Yangtse Opium Den Accounts Leceivable

System.] See CHINESE TOI'AL.

your program n. A maze of PASTEMIC non sequiturs littered with clever-

clever tricks and irrelevant comments. Compare LESS THAN; MY PROGRAM.

238
z
ladeh, Lotti (1921-) Inventor of Farsi, later known as FUZZY, logics, sets,
measure theories, topologies, inference schemata and washing machines. See
also DEFUZZIFICATION; FUZZ; FUZZIFICATION.
~It was while pondering whether his brother Lotti was "quite tall," "tall enough," or
"very tall" that Zadeh hit on the idea of fuzzy sets. The ensuing fuzzy-ethos explosion
and its altercationary aftennath are nicely documented by McNeill and Freiberger
(Fuzzy Logic, Simon & Schuster, 1993). Three quotations they omit are

"I am no respecter of Persians" (Peter Cheeseman).

"When de fuzz hit de fan, man, you gonna run if you can, man!" (Schnapple
lcedTea Rap Group).
"Fuzz neither hits the Fan nor misses the Fan. Fuzz is the Fan (Bart Kosko, Zen
and the An of Fuzzy Maintenance, 2(01).

Also missing is the oratorio "Baisez les Baysiennes" (words: Lotti Zadeh; music:
Georges Baizet).

zap v. trans. [Origin: onomatopoeia.] 1 To kill, delete. 2 To revive, add zest,

enspice. See also AUTO-ANTONYM; TRASH CAN.
~ Thus, you can zap a file of strings or a string of beans. To those of modest palate,
the two meanings may coalesce. The killer-zapper, however, carries mindless, vicious
overtones, echoes of the VIDEO GAME culture of wasting asteroids and alien intelligence
with equal panache-hardly the same as the Szechuan attack on soups and vegetables.

ze~knowledge adj. 1 (Of a proof) ... sorry, I'm not prepared to discuss it.
2. (Of a COMPUTER BOOK author) overqualified.
ZIF 1 Zero-insert Force. 2 Winner of the Miss Zif-Davis Beauty Contest.

239
Acknowledgments

I have been exposed to computing (and vice versa) since the EDSAC I 1950s,
and it would not be easy to list all those who have, knowingly or innocently,
influenced the entries and diatribes in my Computer Contradictionary. With
numbing magnanimity I have acknowledged many known and suspected
sources in the ensuing text, but the data processing whirligig has generated
such a rich and volatile folklore that some errors and omissions must be
expected. I invite proofs of violent injustices, so that future editions might
dilute my claims to originality and reduce my exposure to litigation.
Entries marked [from JARGON F'ILE] are reproduced, with permission and
minor changes, from a computerized glossary maintained at SAIL and MIT
by Mark R. Crispin, Raphael A. Finkel, Guy L. Steele Jr., Richard M.
Stallman, and Donald A. Woods, with the assistance of colleagues from other
AI communities. I am grateful to EI Don, the Mighty Knuth for directing me
circa 1979 toward this definitive source of DP wordage, not to mention the
nondenumerable blessings of his three-going-on-four gospels.
Since the original DDPD (Devil's DP Dictionary) appeared (McGraw-Hill,
1981), the Jargon File has been edited and annotated by Guy L. Steele Jr. (et
ses amis) and published to wild acclaim as THO (The Hacker's Dictionary,
Harper & Row, 1983). TNHD (The New Hacker's Dictionary, The MIT Press,
1990), recompiled and relinked by Eric S. Raymond and Guy L. Steele Jr.,
expanded on THO chiefly reflecting the UNIX pandemic and its new genera-
tion of Hackersprecherin. A second edition of TNHD appeared in 1993, and it
is to this edition that this edition makes reverent cross references (See TIns).
My debt to the original Jargon File, its parents and diverse progeny is hereby
reaffinned.
To further clarify this publicational and referential morass, my entries
marked See also TNHD or More at TNHD direct you to the entry TNHD, which in
turn invites you to examine complementary exegeses in the second edition of
TNHD. Prior exposure to POINTERS, HANDLES and INDIRECI'ION will prove use-
ful.
In 1984 I started writing a monthly column, The Devil's Advocate, for
UNIX Review. With hardly-ever a DEADLINE missed, the column rumbles on,
Acknowledgments

and I feel compelled to thank the UNIX Review publishers, Miller-Freeman

Inc., my current editor-in-chief, St. Andrew Binstock, his current managing
editor, Lea Anne Bantsari, and the hordes of percipient readers who have
encouraged me in this endeavor. My dictionary incorporates their feedback
with locally explicit nods wherever possible. I have also reused material from
my columns in Computer Language (now renamed Software Development)
and OS/2 Magazine. and wish to thank their respective editors, Larry O'Brien
and Alan Zeichick, for their support, which I wear daily.
At extremely odd and awkward moments during my compilation, in both
the informal-osmotic, ceilidh-driven, drunken-walkthrough and structured-
discoursed environments, I have been helped and hindered by Fritz Spiegl;
Michael, Ilse and Christa Godfrey; Carver Mead; Romuald Szramkiewicz;
Peter and Mary Felgett; Doreen Ada Godoy; Margaret Rose, Edmund Paul,
Tim, Toni, David Russell, Peggy and Anna Bootie; Steve and Jane Bourne;
Peter Wegner; Barry Smiler; Bob Fowler; Charles Ackerman; Anton and
Natasha Leof; Allison Wegner; Bertrand Meyer; Michael Marcotty; Anne
Mellinger; Tun Neely; Oleg and Pavel Luksha; Michael Howard; Katharine
Snyder; Patrick Brennan; Melissa Clemens; Judith Williams; Ken Iverson;
Alexander Antoniades; David Crystal; Peter H. Salus; Ed Cherlin; Judith
Williams; Stuart Yarus; Samuel P. Harbison; Pavel and Nina Machotka; Stan
Hey; Kate Mitchell; Richard Nelson; Laura Grenyo; Kelly Rich; Rod
Lehman; Shabbir Khan; Pete Becker; Carolyn Andre; Peter van der Linden;
Michele, Crispin and Samuel Coxon; James, Carol and Luke Bailey; Wesley
Walton; Rudolph Langer; Gary Zoller; The Dean of Westminster; Bjarne
Stroustrup; Joan Smith; Chris Hipwell; Ken Hertzler; Gary Masters; Bob and
Jean Toxen; David Hartley; Maurice Wilkes; the Liverpool Football Club;
John Smart; Karen Rogers; Joe Ce1co; David Intersimone; Nicole Freeman; P.
J. (Bill) Plauger; Bert Speelpenning; Dave Chandler; Mark Halpern; John
Barry; Paul Ceruzzi; Martin Campbell-Kelly; Henry G. Baker; Eric Allman;
Peter, Roz, Kerry and Lyndsey Hazelwood; Kirk McKusick; the Baltimore
Consort; Julia Reisz; Richard Werthimer; David Hendry; Scott Taylor; Kevin
Keegan; la farnille Siner; Ken Arnold; Mark Compton; Crispin Linlehales;
Frederick and Anne Butzen; Cosima SakapuSkaia Kelly; Lill Adolfsen; Fred
and Lisa Avolio; Nathan Myers; Pandu Rudruraju; Robert and Donna Ward;
Ron Burk; Henry G. Nimble; Michael and Tania Marcotty; Marie-France
Plassard; Doug Fraser; Robert DeShetler; Ibrahim and Amal Omar; and the
mysterious Dr. Ellipsis ... See also SPACE PRECLUDES.
A nonlinear salute goes to Barry Richman, Mr. B. R., onlie begetter of the
1981 McGrUr-Hill text. He it was who pushed the DDPD and breeched my
baby. Si parientinas requiris, circumspice! But never look back.

viii
 Acknowledgments

A transcendent appreciation is demanded for those who were acknowl-

edged in, but have died since, the original DDPD. I see no direct cause-effect
here, but a sad guilt pervades: "Y'a des petit's fleurs, y'a des copains au, au
bois de mon coeur ...•• (Georges Brassens). For example, did Peter Davies,
who guided me through the maze of proper lexicographical usages, and (0
Schmerz!) caught my typo logomarchy (shades of malarkey?), ever know how
much his loving help would be missed. Likewise, UCB-UNIX pioneer Jim
Joyce (no relation except in Celtic exuberance), a rare bigraduate in Anglo-
Saxon and Computer Science, is no longer here to hone my vi skills or guz-
zle my Laphroig.
I must also thank the custodians of the Ambrose Bierce House in St.
Helena, California, where I browsed for bitter imbuement, including two
nights spent in Lillie Langtry's bed (she was elsewhere, alas).
In addition to my obvious debt to the Ambrose Bierce corpus (I suspect that
EI Gringo is still alive, boozing in Tijuana, confirming that wit survives
humor), I should acknowledge the influence of three other sources of off-beat
lexicography: Gustave Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idees Re~ues; Georges
Elgozy's Le Contradictionnaire-ou L'esprit des mots; and Jonathon Green's
The Cynic's Lexicon.
I am also greatly indebted to Managing Editor Michael Sims, whose
stakhanovite interceptions have spared you my grosser stylistic and typ0-
graphical solecisms.
Finally, it's an unsettling honor that child of the Devi/'s DP Dictionary has
been nursed into life by The MIT Press, imprint of my deepest linguistic hero,
Noam Chomsky, and the hot-throbbing center of Steven Pinker's "language as
instinct." My unbounded gratitude is therefore declared for Teresa Ehling,
MIT's Acquisitive Editor, Computer Science and Engineering, who initiated
the rebirth and patiently coaxed the delivery.

ix
Permission to quote, adapt, or parody material from the following sources is
gratefully acknowledged.

abacus Cartoon by Michele Coxon.

algorithm Parody based on Ira Gershwin (lyrics) and George Gershwin

(music). "I Got Rhythm," Chappell Music Company, New York.

console and nest Parodies based on Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein
II, "My Favorite Things," Williamson Music Inc., Chappell Music Company,
New york.

decade counter From H. Lukoft', From Dits to Bits, Robotics Press, Portland,
1979.

hexadecimal From William Barden, Jr., TRS-80 Assembly Language

Programming, Radio Shack Publications, 1979.

Jargon me See entry.

lemma three Parody based on Will Holt, "The Lemon Tree," Dolfi Music
Inc., Chappell Music Company, New York.

numerology From D. E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming:

Fundamental Algorithms, vol. 1 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

Ogam From America BC, by Harry Fell © 1970 Quadrangle Books.

Reprinted by permission of Times Books, a division of Quadrangl~ The
New York Tunes Book Company.

reality Parody based on Betty Comden, Jule Styne, and Adolph Green, "The
Party's Over," Chappel Music Company, New York.