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

about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.

:bang: 1. n. Common spoken name for !' (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a {bang path} in spoken hackish. In {elder days} this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring {excl} or {shriek}; but the spread of UNIX has carriedbang' with it (esp. via the term {bang path}) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for !'. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written!'; one would not say "Congratulations bang" (except possibly for humorous purposes), but if one wanted to specify the exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge that one has perpetrated a {thinko} immediately after one has been called on it.

:bang on: vt. To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash once. I guess it is ready for release." The term {pound on} is synonymous.

:bang path: n. An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang} sign.

Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.

In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See {{Internet address}}, {network, the}, and {sitename}.

:banner: n. 1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID

information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a burst page', because it indicates where to burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as UNIX'sbanner({1,6})'. 3. On interactive software, a first screen containing a logo and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice.

:bar: /bar/ n. 1. The second {metasyntactic variable}, after {foo}

and before {baz}. "Suppose we have two functions: FOO and BAR.

FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to {foo} to produce {foobar}.

:bare metal: n. 1. New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit bashing}

needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp.

tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in {The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer} (in {appendix A}), interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems. See {real programmer}.

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense 1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary evil (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}).

There, the term usually refers to bypassing the BIOS or OS

interface and writing the application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing are held in high regard.

:barf: /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']

interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Val-speak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}. 2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input. May mean to give an error message. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old one." See {choke}, {gag}. In Commonwealth hackish, barf' is generally replaced bypuke' or `vom'. {barf}

is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo} or {bar}.

:barfmail: n. Multiple {bounce message}s accumulating to the level of serious annoyance, or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway goes down or wonky.

:barfulation: /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj. Variation of {barf}

used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust.

On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"

:barfulous: /bar'fyoo-ls/ adj. (alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-shs/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.

:barney: n. In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to {fred}

(sense #1) as {bar} is to {foo}. That is, people who commonly use fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often usebarney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.

:baroque: adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform output.

Now that is baroque!" See also {rococo}.

:BartleMUD: /bar'tl-muhd/ n. Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw (see {MUD}). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in object descriptions, so a player is likely to come across brand172', for instance (see {brand brand brand}). Bartle has taken a bad rap in some MUDding circles for supposedly originating this term, but (like the story that MUD is a trademark) this appears to be a myth; he usesMUD1'.

:BASIC: n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like {Pascal}) of the bad things that happen when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will bite him/her later if he/she tries to hack in a real language. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.

:batch: adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input are often referred to as batch mode' switches. Abatch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting.

"I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the electricity back on next week..." 3. Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling center."

:bathtub curve: n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time: initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'. See also {burn-in period}, {infant mortality}.

:baud: /bawd/ [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second.

The technical