:hysterical reasons: /n./ (also `hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase "for historical reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare {bug-for-bug compatible}.
= I = =====
:I didn't change anything!: /interj./ An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. The {canonical} reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See also {one-line fix}. This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which actually {hosed} the code completely.
:I see no X here.: Hackers (and the interactive computergames they write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usageover other possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or"X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to theoriginal PDP-10 {ADVENT}, which would respond in this wise ifyou asked it to do something involving an object not present atyour location in the game.
:IBM: /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's BetterManually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning;Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of evenless complimentary expansions, including `International BusinessMachines'. See {TLA}. These abbreviations illustrate theconsiderable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the`industry leader' (see {fear and loathing}).
What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't so much that they are underpowered and overpriced (though that does count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic, {crufty}, and {elephantine} … and you can't *fix* them — source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found them. With the release of the Unix-based RIOS family this may have begun to change — but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came out, too.
In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground.
:IBM discount: /n./ A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from the common perception that IBM products are generally overpriced (see {clone}); inside, it is said to spring from a belief that large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause prices to rise.
:ICBM address: /n./ (Also `missile address') The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project includes a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This is actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it has become traditional to refer to this as one's `ICBM address' or `missile address', and many people include it in their {sig block} with that name. (A real missile address would include target altitude.)
:ice: /n./ [coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to immobilize or even literally kill the intruder). Hence, `icebreaker': a program designed for cracking security on a system.
Neither term is in serious use yet as of early 1996, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the future. In the meantime, the speculative usage could be confused with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit emulator".
In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some hackers and computer scientists formed ICE (International Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to promote uniform international access to strong cryptography. ICE has a home page at http://www.tis.com/crypto/ice.html.
:idempotent: /adj./ [from mathematical techspeak] Acting as if used only once, even if used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to {C} header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called several times.
:If you want X, you know where to find it.: There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of {C}, once responded to demands for features resembling those of what at the time was a much more popular language by observing "If you want PL/I, you know where to find it." Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to alter a new design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and {baroque}) one. The case X = {Pascal} manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in discussions of graphics software (see {X}).
:ifdef out: /if'def owt/ /v./ Syn. for {condition out}, specific to {C}.
:ill-behaved: /adj./ 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software that bypasses the defined {OS} interfaces to do things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. See also {bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved}, compare {PC-ism}. See {mess-dos}.
:IMHO: // /abbrev./ [from SF fandom via Usenet; abbreviation for `In My Humble Opinion'] "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors — and they look too Pascalish anyhow." Also seen in variant forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).
:Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: /prov./ [Usenet] Since {Usenet} first got off the ground in 1980—81, it has grown exponentially, approximately doubling in size every year. On the other hand, most people feel the {signal-to-noise ratio} of Usenet has dropped steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of the imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings later, enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded that the phrase "Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!" has become a running joke, hauled out any time someone grumbles about the {S/N ratio} or the huge and steadily increasing volume, or the possible loss of a key node or link, or the potential for lawsuits when ignoramuses post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.
:in the extreme: /adj./ A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for example, `obscure in the extreme' under {obscure}, and compare {highly}.
:inc: /ink/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for increment, i.e. `increase by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have an `inc' mnemonic. Antonym: {dec}.
:incantation: /n./ Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a {wizard}. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you {mutter} the right incantation they will be forced into text space."
:include: /vt./ [Usenet] 1. To duplicate a portion (or whole)
of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in
a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response.
See the discussion of inclusion styles under "Hacker Writing
Style". 2. [from {C}] `#include
:include war: /n./ Excessive multi-leveled inclusion within a discussion {thread}, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as Usenet, this can lead to {flame}s and the urge to start a {kill file}.
:indent style: /n./ [C programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion. There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of control constructs. The significant variable is the placement of `{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling statement (`if', `else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block, if any.
`K&R style' — Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples in {K&R} are formatted this way. Also called `kernel style' because the Unix kernel is written in it, and the `One True Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. The basic indent shown here is eight spaces (or one tab) per level; four spaces are occasionally seen, but are much less common.
if (
`Allman style' — Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker whowrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called`BSD style'). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal andAlgol. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but fourspaces are just as common (esp. in C++ code).
if (
`Whitesmiths style' — popularized by the examples that camewith Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indentper level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces areoccasionally seen.
if (
`GNU style' — Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free SoftwareFoundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are alwaysfour spaces per level, with `{' and `}' halfway between theouter and inner indent levels.
if (
Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly universal, but is now much less common (the opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an `if' or `while', which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less important than their style's relative economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at once. Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}.
:index: /n./ See {coefficient of X}.
:infant mortality: /n./ It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems (or, occasionally, as `sudden infant death syndrome'). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.
:infinite: /adj./ Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to follow `infinite', though, is {hair}. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The term `semi-infinite', denoting an immoderately large amount of some resource, is also heard. "This compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program." See also {semi}.
:infinite loop: /n./ One that never terminates (that is, the machine {spin}s or {buzz}es forever and goes {catatonic}). There is a standard joke that has been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!"
:Infinite-Monkey Theorem: /n./ "If you put an {infinite} number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the intelligence of the one {random} monkey that eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible *incorrect* versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a {brute force} method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a {one-banana problem}.
This theorem was first popularized by the astronomer Sir ArthurEddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classicSF short story "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, andmany younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
:infinity: /n./ 1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever). 2. `minus infinity': The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2^(N-1) - 1 but minus infinity is - (2^(N-1)), not -(2^(N-1) - 1). Note also that this is different from "time T equals minus infinity", which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
:inflate: /vt./ To decompress or {puff} a file. Rare among Internet hackers, used primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.
:Infocom: /n./ A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that commercialized the MDL parser technology used for {Zork} to produce a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's items. The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and freeware emulators for that interpreter have been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced.
:initgame: /in-it'gaym/ /n./ [IRC] An {IRC} version of the venerable trivia game "20 questions", in which one user changes his {nick} to the initials of a famous person or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR means "Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See also {hing}.
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become astaple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! —ESR]
:insanely great: /adj./ [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly {elegant} that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of {hacker}-natures.
:INTERCAL: /in't*r-kal/ /n./ [said by the authors to stand for `Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear:
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:
DO :1 <- #0$#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and … appreciation of the language on Usenet.
An INTERCAL implementation is available at the RetrocomputingMuseum, http://www.ccil.org/retro.
:interesting: /adj./ In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Oppose {trivial}, {uninteresting}.
:Internet:: /n./ The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between *humans* and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC {PDP-10}s and {PDP-20}s, running {TOPS-10} and {TOPS-20}, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running {Unix}, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to {TCP/IP} in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. With TCP/IP and DNS in place. It was around this time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines — connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, the {killer app} was not the anticipated one — rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. As of early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also {network, the} and {Internet address}.
:Internet address:: /n./ 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a {sitename}, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also {network, the} and {network address}. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and {PD} software written since 1980 or so. See also {bang path}, {domainist}. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includes {bang path} addresses and some internal corporate and government networks.
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains:
comcommercial organizationsedueducational institutionsgovU.S. government civilian sitesmilU.S. military sites
Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are inthe U.S. or Canada.
ussites in the U.S. outside the functional domainssusites in the ex-Soviet Union (see {kremvax}).uksites in the United Kingdom
Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.
:interrupt: 1. [techspeak] /n./ On a computer, an event thatinterrupts normal processing and temporarily divertsflow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also{trap}. 2. /interj./ A request for attention from a hacker.Often explicitly spoken. "Interrupt — have you seen Joerecently?" See {priority interrupt}. 3. Under MS-DOS, nearlysynonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routinesare both called using the INT instruction (see {{interrupt list,the}}) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS(goingdirectly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonableperformance.
:interrupt list, the:: /n./ [MS-DOS] The list of all known
software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM
PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free
redistribution by Ralf Brown
:interrupts locked out: /adj./ When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is also common. Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked out" are also heard. See also {spl}.
:IRC: /I-R-C/ /n./ [Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide "party line" network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the {Usenet} and {MUD} communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as {emoticon}s. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See also {talk mode}.
:iron: /n./ Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of {mainframe} class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase {big iron}. Oppose {silicon}. See also {dinosaur}.
:Iron Age: /n./ In the history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when ferrite-core {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also {Stone Age}; compare {elder days}.
:iron box: /n./ [Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap a {cracker} logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified {shell} restricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also {back door}, {firewall machine}, {Venus flytrap}, and Clifford Stoll's account in "{The Cuckoo's Egg}" of how he made and used one (see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C). Compare {padded cell}.
:ironmonger: /n./ [IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare {sandbender}, {polygon pusher}.
:ISP: /I-S-P/ Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the mass market. While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet access (like America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are technically ISPs, the term is usually reserved for local or regional small providers (often run by hackers turned entrepreneurs) who resell Internet access cheaply without themselves being information providers or selling advertising. Compare {NSP}.
:ITS:: /I-T-S/ /n./ 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, aninfluential though highly idiosyncratic operating system writtenforPDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. MuchAI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `anITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the mostvenerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations,including transparent file sharing between machines andterminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work wasshifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes runessentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. Theshutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the endof an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see{high moby}). The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden ismaintaining one `live' ITS site at its computer museum (rightnext to the only TOPS-10 system still on the Internet), so ITS isstill alleged to hold the record for OS in longest continuous use(however, {{WAITS}} is a credible rival for this palm). 2. Amythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by abizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see{troglodyte}, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow tocontinue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-languagehand-hacking that supported only monocase 6-character filenames inone directory per account remains superior to today's state ofcommercial art (their venom against Unix is particularly intense).See also {holy wars}, {Weenix}.
:IWBNI: // Abbreviation for `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare{WIBNI}.
:IYFEG: // [Usenet] Abbreviation for `Insert Your FavoriteEthnic Group'. Used as a meta-name when telling ethnic jokes onthe net to avoid offending anyone. See {JEDR}.
= J = =====
:J. Random: /J rand'm/ /n./ [generalized from {J. Random Hacker}] Arbitrary; ordinary; any one; any old. `J. Random' is often prefixed to a noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly `some particular' or `any specific one'. "Would you let J. Random Loser marry your daughter?" The most common uses are `J. Random Hacker', `J. Random Loser', and `J. Random Nerd' ("Should J. Random Loser be allowed to {gun} down other people?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of {random} in any sense.
:J. Random Hacker: /J rand'm hak'r/ /n./ [MIT] A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See {random}, {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been inspired by `J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a household word back in the early days of {TMRC}, and was probably influenced by `J. Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors of the electronic computer).
:jack in: /v./ To log on to a machine or connect to a network or {BBS}, esp. for purposes of entering a {virtual reality} simulation such as a {MUD} or {IRC} (leaving is "jacking out"). This term derives from {cyberpunk} SF, in which it was used for the act of plugging an electrode set into neural sockets in order to interface the brain directly to a virtual reality. It is primarily used by MUD and IRC fans and younger hackers on BBS systems.
:jaggies: /jag'eez/ /n./ The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).
:JCL: /J-C-L/ /n./ 1. IBM's supremely {rude} Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very {fascist} syntax, and some versions will, for example, {barf} if two spaces appear where it expects one. Most programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at IBM itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme to express their opinion of the beast. 2. A comparative for any very {rude} software that a hacker is expected to use. "That's as bad as JCL." As with {COBOL}, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}.
A (poorly documented, naturally) shell simulating JCL syntax is available at the Retrocomputing Museum http://www.ccil.org/retro.
:JEDR: // /n./ Synonymous with {IYFEG}. At one time,
people in the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.funny tended to use
`JEDR' instead of {IYFEG} or `
:JFCL: /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt. `jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag set and then CLear the flag"; this does something useful, but is a very fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one of the Steele-1983 co-authors, had JFCL on the license plate of his BMW for years. Usage: rare except among old-time PDP-10 hackers.
:jiffy: /n./ 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your computer (see {tick}). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second. 2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond {wall time} interval. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use `jiffy' to mean the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to be close to one *nanosecond*. 3. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. This is a bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose {nano}. See also {Real Soon Now}.
:job security: /n./ When some piece of code is written in a particularly {obscure} fashion, and no good reason (such as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job security (i.e., by making himself indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at a section and says "job security", the other one may just nod.
:jock: /n./ 1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute-force programs. See {brute force}. 2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds `compiler jock' and `systems jock' seem to be the best-established examples.
:joe code: /joh' kohd`/ /n./ 1. Code that is overly {tense} and unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a handy program, but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly written, possibly buggy code.
Correspondents wishing to remain anonymous have fingered aparticular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observedthat usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code'was intended in sense 1.
1994 update: This term has now generalized to `
:jolix: /joh'liks/ /n.,adj./ 386BSD, the freeware port of the BSD Net/2 release to the Intel i386 architecture by Bill Jolitz and friends. Used to differentiate from BSDI's port based on the same source tape, which used to be called BSD/386 and is now BSD/OS. See {BSD}.
:JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ /n./ The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID used under {{TOPS-10}} and {WAITS}; they were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser' and `J. Random Nerd' (see {J. Random}). For example, if one said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is, "log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should use his own computer ID in place of `JRN'.
:JRST: /jerst/ /v. obs./ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the previous topic. Usage: rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly. See also {AOS}.
:juggling eggs: /vi./ Keeping a lot of {state} in your head while modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF novel "The Mote in God's Eye", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." See also {hack mode}.
:jump off into never-never land: /v./ [from J. M. Barrie's"Peter Pan"] Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more commonin technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that usethe term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare{hyperspace}.
:jupiter: /vt./ [IRC] To kill an {IRC} {robot} or userand then take its place by adopting its {nick} so that it cannotreconnect. Named after a particular IRC user who did this toNickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people frominadvertently using a nick claimed by another user.
= K = =====
:K: /K/ /n./ [from {kilo-}] A kilobyte. Used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like {meg} and {gig} for megabyte and gigabyte). See {{quantifiers}}.
:K&R: [Kernighan and Ritchie] /n./ Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book "The C Programming Language", esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3). Syn. {White Book}, {Old Testament}. See also {New Testament}.
:k-: /pref./ Extremely. Not commonly used among hackers, but quite common among crackers and {warez d00dz} in compounds such as `k-kool' /K'kool'/, `k-rad' /K'rad'/, and `k-awesome' /K'aw`sm/. Also used to intensify negatives; thus, `k-evil', `k-lame', `k-screwed', and `k-annoying'. Overuse of this prefix, or use in more formal or technical contexts, is considered an indicator of {lamer} status.
:kahuna: /k*-hoo'n*/ /n./ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] Synonym for {wizard}, {guru}.
:kamikaze packet: /n./ The `official' jargon for what is more commonly called a {Christmas tree packet}. {RFC}-1025, "TCP and IP Bake Off" says:
10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data).
See also {Chernobyl packet}.
:kangaroo code: /n./ Syn. {spaghetti code}.
:ken: /ken/ /n./ 1. [Unix] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of Unix. In the early days he used to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalized, because it's a login name and mail address) in third-person reference; it is widely understood (on Usenet, in particular) that without a last name `Ken' refers only to Ken Thompson. Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie (and he is often known as dmr). See also {demigod}, {{Unix}}. 2. A flaming user. This was originated by the Software Support group at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community were both named Ken.
:kgbvax: /K-G-B'vaks/ /n./ See {kremvax}.
:KIBO: /ki:'boh/ 1. [acronym] Knowledge In, Bullshit Out.
A summary of what happens whenever valid data is passed through an
organization (or person) that deliberately or accidentally
disregards or ignores its significance. Consider, for example,
what an advertising campaign can do with a product's actual
specifications. Compare {GIGO}; see also {SNAFU principle}.
2. James Parry
:kiboze: /v./ [Usenet] To {grep} the Usenet news for a string, especially with the intention of posting a follow-up. This activity was popularised by Kibo (see {KIBO}, sense 2).
:kibozo: /ki:-boh'zoh/ /n./ [Usenet] One who {kiboze}s but is not Kibo (see {KIBO}, sense 2).
:kick: /v./ [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a {IRC} channel, an option only available to {CHOP}s. This is an extreme measure, often used to combat extreme {flamage} or {flood}ing, but sometimes used at the chop's whim. Compare {gun}.
:kill file: /n./ [Usenet] (alt. `KILL file') Per-user file(s) used by some {Usenet} reading programs (originally Larry Wall's `rn(1)') to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Thus to add a person (or subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored by one's newsreader in future. By extension, it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media. See also {plonk}.
:killer app: The application that actually makes a mass market for a promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s to describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that demand for that product had been the major driver of the early business market for IBM PCs. The term was then restrospectively applied to VisiCalc, which had played a similar role in the success of the Apple II. After 1994 it became commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as the Internet's killer app. One of the standard questions asked about each new personal-computer technology as it emerges has become "what's the killer app?"
:killer micro: /n./ [popularized by Eugene Brooks] A microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the downsizers. Used esp. of RISC architectures.
The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is doubtless reinforced by the title of the movie "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the {canonical} examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more {flavor} now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers).
[1996 update: Eugene Brooks was right. Since this term first entered the Jargon File in 1990, the minicomputer has effectively vanished, the {mainframe} sector is in deep and apparently terminal decline (with IBM but a shadow of its former self), and even the supercomputer business has contracted into a smaller niche. It's networked killer micros as far as the eye can see. —ESR]
:killer poke: /n./ A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see {poke}) into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on {bitty box}es without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also {HCF}.
:kilo-: /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:KIPS: /kips/ /n./ [abbreviation, by analogy with {MIPS} using {K}] Thousands (*not* 1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage: rare.
:KISS Principle: /kis' prin'si-pl/ /n./ "Keep It Simple, Stupid". A maxim often invoked when discussing design to fend off {creeping featurism} and control development complexity. Possibly related to the {marketroid} maxim on sales presentations, "Keep It Short and Simple".
:kit: /n./ [Usenet; poss. fr. DEC slang for a full software distribution, as opposed to a patch or upgrade] A source software distribution that has been packaged in such a way that it can (theoretically) be unpacked and installed according to a series of steps using only standard Unix tools, and entirely documented by some reasonable chain of references from the top-level {README file}. The more general term {distribution} may imply that special tools or more stringent conditions on the host environment are required.
:klone: /klohn/ /n./ See {clone}, sense 4.
:kludge: 1. /klooj/ /n./ Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of {kluge} (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II. 2. [TMRC] A {crock} that works. (A long-ago "Datamation" article by Jackson Granholme similarly said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.") 3. /v./ To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."
This word appears to have derived from Scots `kludge' or `kludgie' for a common toilet, via British military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S. {kluge} during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both words in definably different ways, but {kluge} is now uncommon in Great Britain. `Kludge' in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from `kluge' in that it lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth hacker wants to be associated too closely with. Also, `kludge' is more widely known in British mainstream slang than `kluge' is in the U.S.
:kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever; poss. related to Polish `klucza', a trick or hook] 1. /n./ A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. 2. /n./ A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves {ad-hockery} and verges on being a {crock}. 3. /n./ Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. /vt./ To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." 5. [WPI] /n./ A feature that is implemented in a {rude} manner.
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling `kludge'. Reports from {old fart}s are consistent that `kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of *hardware* kluges. In 1947, the "New York Folklore Quarterly" reported a classic shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a `kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other sources report that `kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea.
However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a device called a "Kluge paper feeder", an adjunct to mechanical printing presses. Legend has it that the Kluge feeder was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair — but oh, so clever! People who tell this story also aver that `Kluge' was the name of a design engineer.
There is in fact a Brandtjen & Kluge Inc., an old family business that manufactures printing equipment — interestingly, their name is pronounced /kloo'gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that his company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloo'gee/, who built and co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr. Brandtjen claims, however, that this was a *simple* device (with only four cams); he says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold.
{TMRC} and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also {foobar}). It seems likely that `kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's venerable Building 20, in which {TMRC} is also located) during the war.
The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the {Datamation} article mentioned above; it was titled "How to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where {kludge} has an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think {kludge} was just a mutation of {kluge}). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own `kludge' when `kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the `kludge' orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!
The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as `kludge'. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.) British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned the word from written American sources and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the wider American meaning!
Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word'smeaning.
:kluge around: /vt./ To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting a {kluge}. Compare {workaround}.
:kluge up: /vt./ To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder than {cruft together} and has some of the connotations of {hack up} (note, however, that the construction `kluge on' corresponding to {hack on} is never used). "I've kluged up this routine to dump the buffer contents to a safe place."
:Knights of the Lambda Calculus: /n./ A semi-mythicalorganization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name refersto a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with whichLISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and thecriteria for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer hasbeen known to give out buttons and, in general, the *members*know who they are….
:Knuth: /knooth'/ /n./ [Donald E. Knuth's "The Art ofComputer Programming"] Mythically, the reference that answers allquestions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer whenyou do not know: "I think you can find that in Knuth." Contrast{literature, the}. See also {bible}. There is a DonaldKnuth home page athttp://www-cs-faculty.Stanford.EDU/~knuth.
:kremvax: /krem-vaks/ /n./ [from the then large number of {Usenet} {VAXen} with names of the form foovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and {kgbvax}. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time.
In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax!
Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the Russian-language material for this lexicon. —ESR]
In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking were proved devastatingly accurate — and the original kremvax joke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of `glasnost' and `perestroika' made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the West.
:kyrka: /shir'k*/ /n./ [Swedish] See {feature key}.
= L = =====
:lace card: /n. obs./ A {{punched card}} with all holes punched (also called a `whoopee card' or `ventilator card'). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a `card knife' — which you used on the joker first.
:lamer: /n./ [prob. originated in skateboarder slang] Synonym for {luser}, not used much by hackers but common among {warez d00dz}, crackers, and {phreaker}s. Oppose {elite}. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of {luser} does among hackers.
Crackers also use it to refer to cracker {wannabee}s. In phreak culture, a lamer is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really understanding the fundamental concepts. In {warez d00dz} culture, where the ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before) release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as a few years to anything older than 3 days).
:language lawyer: /n./ A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Compare {wizard}, {legal}, {legalese}.
:languages of choice: /n./ {C}, {C++}, {LISP}, and{Perl}. Nearly every hacker knows one of C or LISP, and mostgood ones are fluent in both. C++, despite some serious drawbacks,is generally preferred to other object-oriented languages (thoughin1996 it looks as though Java may soon displace it in the affectionsof hackers, if not everywhere). Since around 1990 Perl has rapidlybeen gaining favor, especially as a tool for systems-administrationutilities and rapid prototyping. Smalltalk and Prolog are alsopopular in small but influential communities.
There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as {Real Programmer}s, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "{The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer}" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but {HLL} implementation, {glue}, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.
Most hackers tend to frown on languages like {{Pascal}} and {{Ada}}, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see {bondage-and-discipline language}), and to regard everything even remotely connected with {COBOL} or other traditional {card walloper} languages as a total and unmitigated {loss}.
:larval stage: /n./ Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour {hacking run} in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more `normal' life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also {wannabee}. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new {OS} or programming language.
:lase: /layz/ /vt./ To print a given document via a laser printer. "OK, let's lase that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things."
:laser chicken: /n./ Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it `laser chicken' for two reasons: It can {zap} you just like a laser, and the sauce has a red color reminiscent of some laser beams.
In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have redesignated the common dish `lemon chicken' as `Chernobyl Chicken'. The name is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).
:Lasherism: /n./ [Harvard] A program that solves a standard problem (such as the Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the {life} algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a {crock} or {kluge} by the fact that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the {Obfuscated C Contest}, and occasionally in {retrocomputing}. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior.
:laundromat: /n./ Syn. {disk farm}; see {washing machine}.
:LDB: /l*'d*b/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To extract from the middle. "LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See also {DPB}.
:leaf site: /n./ A machine that merely originates and reads Usenet news or mail, and does not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the network tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}, {rib site}.
:leak: /n./ With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new allocation requests come in. {memory leak} and {fd leak} have their own entries; one might also refer, to, say, a `window handle leak' in a window system.
:leaky heap: /n./ [Cambridge] An {arena} with a {memory leak}.
:leapfrog attack: /n./ Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host (e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).
:leech: /n./ Among BBS types, crackers and {warez d00dz}, one who consumes knowledge without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker culture extends this definition to someone (a {lamer}, usually) who constantly presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to contribute.
:legal: /adj./ Loosely used to mean `in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp. in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+ alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of `natural laws' to achieve a desired objective. Their use of `legal' is flavored as much by this game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and lawyers. Compare {language lawyer}, {legalese}.
:legalese: /n./ Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification, or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a {language lawyer} to {parse} it. Though hackers are not afraid of high information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both), they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with deception, {suit}s, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end of the stick.
:LER: /L-E-R/ /n./ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] A light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See also {SED}.
:LERP: /lerp/ /vi.,n./ Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line."
:let the smoke out: /v./ To fry hardware (see {fried}). See {magic smoke} for a discussion of the underlying mythology.
:letterbomb: 1. /n./ A piece of {email} containing {live data} intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see {cycle}, sense 3) to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic. See also {Trojan horse}; compare {nastygram}. 2. Loosely, a {mailbomb}.
:lexer: /lek'sr/ /n./ Common hacker shorthand for `lexicalanalyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language(the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). "Some C lexersget confused by the old-style compound ops like `=-'."
:lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/ /n./ A notorious word {chomper}on ITS. See {bagbiter}. This program would draw on a selectedvictim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in ornateletters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.