• Jargon Lexicon

    Search the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

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  • Meat for the hacker's diet

    The Jargon File is great by itself, but it also has plenty of references to invaluable resources, born from the quintessence of the hacker community. For your convenience we have compiled the list of all books that have been mentioned throughout the Jargon File. Here's a random example:

    Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools

    Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman. Addison-Wesley 1986; .

    Also known as the ‘Red Dragon Book’ because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled ‘complexity of compiler design’ and a knight bearing the lance ‘LALR parser generator’ among his other trappings.

    From the back cover -- This introduction to compilers is the direct descendant of the well-known book by Aho and Ullman, Principles Of Compiler Design ( ). The authors present updated coverage of compilers based on research and techniques that have been developed in the field over the past few years. The book provides a thorough introduction to compiler design and covers topics such as context-free grammars, fine state machines, and syntax-directed translation.

    This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Dragon Book.



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  • Random terms

    BFI

    BFI /B·F·I/ n.

    See brute force and ignorance. Also encountered in the variants BFMI, “brute force and massive ignorance” and BFBI “brute force and bloody ignorance”. In some parts of the U.S. this abbreviation was probably reinforced by a company called Browning-Ferris Industries in the waste-management business; a large BFI logo in white-on-blue could be seen on the sides of garbage trucks.

    weeble

    weeble /weeb´l/ interj.

    [Cambridge] Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. “I stuck the disk in upside down.” “Weeble....”.

    TOPS-10

    TOPS-10 /tops·ten/ n.

    DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled PDP-10 machines, long a favorite of hackers but now long extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see Appendix A. See also ITS, TOPS-20, TWENEX, VMS, operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from ‘bottoms-ten’) as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.