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

can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a high bogosity index', whereas you would be less likely to speak of ahigh bogosity factor'. Foo index' suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane cost-of-living index;coefficient of foo' suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say coefficient of bogosity', whereas others might feel it is a combination of factors and thus saybogosity index'.

:cokebottle: /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the{altmode}-altmode-cokebottle'

commands at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet keyboard}, cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager,mwm(1)', has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) control-meta-bang' (see {bang}). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke ascokebottle'. See also {quadruple bucky}.

:cold boot: n. See {boot}.

:COME FROM: n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the go to';COME FROM' would cause the referenced label to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached it control would quietly and {automagically} be transferred to the statement following the COME FROM'.COME FROM' was first proposed in R.L. Clark's "A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less programming", which appeared in a 1973 {Datamation}

issue (and was reprinted in the April 1984 issue of Communications of the ACM'). This parodied the then-ragingstructured programming' {holy wars} (see {considered harmful}). Mythically, some variants are the `assigned COME

FROM' and the computed COME FROM' (parodying some nasty control constructs in FORTRAN and some extended BASICs). Of course, multi-tasking (or non-determinism) could be implemented by having more than oneCOME FROM' statement coming from the same label.

In some ways the FORTRAN DO' looks like aCOME FROM'

statement. After the terminating statement number/`CONTINUE'

is reached, control continues at the statement following the DO.

Some generous FORTRANs would allow arbitrary statements (other than `CONTINUE') for the statement, leading to examples like: DO 10 I=1,LIMIT

C imagine many lines of code here, leaving the C original DO statement lost in the spaghetti... WRITE(6,10) I,FROB(I) 10 FORMAT(1X,I5,G10.4)

in which the trapdoor is just after the statement labeled 10.

(This is particularly surprising because the label doesn't appear to have anything to do with the flow of control at all!) While sufficiently astonishing to the unsuspecting reader, this form of `COME FROM' statement isn't completely general. After all, control will eventually pass to the following statement. The implementation of the general form was left to Univac FORTRAN, ca. 1975 (though a roughly similar feature existed on the IBM 7040

ten years earlier). The statement AT 100' would perform aCOME FROM 100'. It was intended strictly as a debugging aid, with dire consequences promised to anyone so deranged as to use it in production code. More horrible things had already been perpetrated in production languages, however; doubters need only contemplate the `ALTER' verb in {COBOL}.

`COME FROM' was supported under its own name for the first time 15 years later, in C-INTERCAL (see {INTERCAL}, {retrocomputing}); knowledgeable observers are still reeling from the shock.

:comm mode: /kom mohd/ [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line chat; the term may spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for {talk mode}.

:command key: [Mac users] n. Syn. {feature key}.

:comment out: vt. To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix every line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but you want to leave it in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some other part of the code. Compare {condition out}, usually the preferred technique in languages (such as {C}) that make it possible.

:Commonwealth Hackish:: n. Hacker jargon as spoken outside the U.S., esp. in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like char' andsoc', etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in {newsgroup}

names tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix {meta} may be pronounced /mee't/; similarly, Greek letter beta is often /bee't/, zeta is often /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred {metasyntactic variable}s include {blurgle}, eek',ook', frodo', andbilbo'; wibble',wobble', and in emergencies wubble';banana', wombat',frog', {fish}, and so on and on (see {foo}, sense 4).

Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes -o-rama',frenzy' (as in feeding frenzy), and city' (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American termsparens', brackets', andbraces' for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers brackets',square brackets', and curly brackets'. Also, the use ofpling' for {bang} is common outside the United States.

See also {attoparsec}, {calculator}, {chemist}, {console jockey}, {fish}, {go-faster stripes}, {grunge}, {hakspek}, {heavy metal}, {leaky heap}, {lord high fixer}, {loose bytes}, {muddie}, {nadger}, {noddy}, {psychedelicware}, {plingnet}, {raster blaster}, {RTBM}, {seggie}, {spod}, {sun lounge}, {terminal junkie}, {tick-list features}, {weeble}, {weasel}, {YABA}, and notes or definitions under {Bad Thing}, {barf}, {bogus}, {bum}, {chase pointers}, {cosmic rays}, {crippleware}, {crunch}, {dodgy}, {gonk}, {hamster}, {hardwarily}, {mess-dos}, {nybble}, {proglet}, {root}, {SEX}, {tweak}, and {xyzzy}.

:compact: adj. Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent tool that is not compact.

Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting {feature}s and {cruft} that don't merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of {Classic C} maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).

:compiler jock: n. See {jock} (sense 2).

:compress: [UNIX] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally refers to {crunch}ing of a file using a particular C implementation of compression by James A. Woods et al. and widely circulated via {USENET}; use of {crunch} itself in this sense is rare among UNIX hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, `IEEE Computer', vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19.

:Compu$erve: n. See {CI$}. The synonyms CompuSpend and Compu$pend are also reported.

:computer confetti: n. Syn. {chad}. Though this term is common, this use of punched-card chad is not a good idea, as the pieces are stiff and have sharp corners that could injure the eyes. GLS

reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT during which he and a few other guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The groom later grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the evening trying to get the stuff out of their hair.

:computer geek: n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage of nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in {larval stage}. Also calledturbo nerd', `turbo geek'. See also {propeller head}, {clustergeeking}, {geek out}, {wannabee}, {terminal junkie}, {spod}, {weenie}.

:computron: /kom'pyoo-tron`/ n. 1. A notional unit of computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store times megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU

EMACS, it doesn't have enough computrons!" This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat computing power as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel horsepower. See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {crank}.

A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of computation or information, in much the same way that an electron bears one unit of electric charge (see also {bogon}). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts because the molecules have lost their information about where they are supposed to be (that is, they have emitted computrons).

This explains why computers get so hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it should be possible to