The Hacker's Dictionary, - [best reads of all time .txt] 📗

chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). _ Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm]. ` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; <grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; <opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote. {} Common: open/close brace; left/right brace; left/right squiggly; left/right squiggly bracket/brace; left/right curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; left/right squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet]. | Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike]. ~ Common: <tilde>; squiggle; {twiddle}; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].

The pronunciation of #' aspound' is common in the U.S.

but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic

happens to replace #'; thus Britishers sometimes call#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash'

outside the U.S.

The uparrow' name for circumflex andleftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963

version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation characters.

The swung dash' orapproximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material

but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare {angle brackets}).

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #',$', >', and&' characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, #' in many assembler-programming cultures,$' in the 6502 world, >' at Texas Instruments, and&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}.

The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in use.

:ASCII art: n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly |',-', /',', and +'). Also known ascharacter graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example: o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O

L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-//-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+ A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit Figure 1.

And here are some very silly examples: |///| _/| |_/| ___

| | o.O| ACK! / _ |` '| _/ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / / / | (o)(o) U / C _) (__) /// _____ //// | ,___| (oo) / / | / /------- U (__) /____ || | /---V `v'- oo ) / ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/ Figure 2.

There is an important subgenre of humorous ASCII art that takes advantage of the names of the various characters to tell a pun-based joke.

+--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | +--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch " Figure 3.

Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more: () () (__) (/) ($$) (**) /-------/ /-------/ /-------/

/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love Figure 4.

:attoparsec: n. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1 attoparsec/{microfortnight}

equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See {micro-}.

:autobogotiphobia: /aw'to-boh-got`-foh'bee-/ n. See {bogotify}.

:automagically: /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/ adv.

Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker