Further investigation of the hacker culture influencing Modern English from the perspective
Bibliography
1. Амосова Н.Н. Английская контекстология. Л., 1968. – 126с.
2. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка. М., Высшая школа, 1973. – 301с.
3. Гальперин И.Р. Очерки по стилистике английского языка. М.: Библиотека филолога, 1958. –458с.
4. Гинзбург Р.З., Хидекель С.С., Князева Г.Ю. и Санкин А.А. Лексикология английского языка. – 2-е изд., испр. и доп. – М.: Высшая школа,1979. – 269с.
5. Каращук П.М. Словообразование английского языка. М., 1965.
6. Кубрякова Е.С. Что такое словообразование. М., 1965.
7. Мешков О.Д. Словообразование современного английского языка. М., 1972.
8. Мостовий М.І. Лексикологія англійської мови. Х.: Основа, 1993. – 256с.
9. Раєвська Н.М. Лексикологія англійської мови
10. Швейцар А.Д. Литературный английский язик в США и Англии. М., 1971.
Compilers: Raphael Finkel (1975), In 1976, Mark Crispin (1976), Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. (1981), Charles Spurgeon, Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, Mark Crispin, Richard M. Stallman, and Geoff Goodfellow.
Glossary of Terms
= A =
AI /A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
AI-complete /A-I k*m-pleet'/ /adj./ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard. Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human).
AI koans /A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./
A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture
ASCII /as'kee/ /n./ [acronym: American Standard Code for Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.
ASCII art /n./
The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+').
ASCIIbetical order /as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ /adj.,n./ Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order.
= B =
backbone site /n./ A key Usenet and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps.
BAD /B-A-D/ /adj./ [IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] Said of a program that is bogus because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess.
bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ /n./
1. a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner.
E.g.:"This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!"
2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly.
Syn.: loser, cretin, chomper.
3. `bite the bag' /vi./ To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's `lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.
bagbiting /adj./ Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number."
bang
1. /n./ Common spoken name for `!' /interj./ An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!"
barf /barf/ or /ba:f/ /n.,v./ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']
1. /interj./ Term of disgust.
2. /vi./ to express disgust.
E.g.: "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, perhaps with a suitable error message, perhaps not.
E.g.: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." means that 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.
Syn.: choke, gag.
In Commonwealth Hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'.
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-l*s/ /adj./
(alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/)
Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
BASIC /bay'-sic/ /n./ [acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] 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. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens 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 (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. 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.
[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]
BiCapitalization /n./
The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript, NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization
big win /n./
Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See win big.