The Hackers'''' Dictionary legal torrents phần 2 doc

[angle/right angle].

= Common: <equals>; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].

? Common: query; <question mark>; {ques}. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook;

hunchback.

@ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose;

cabbage; <commercial at>.

V Rare: [book].

[] Common: left/right square bracket; <opening/closing bracket>; bracket/unbracket; left/right bracket. Rare:

square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back].

\ Common: backslash; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash;

<reverse slant>; reversed virgule; [backslat].

^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare: chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the

power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).

_ Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].

` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; <grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime;

[backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; <opening single quotation mark>;

quasiquote.

{} Common: open/close brace; left/right brace; left/right squiggly; left/right squiggly bracket/brace; left/right

curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; left/right

squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].

| Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three

from UNIX); [spike].

~ Common: <tilde>; squiggle; {twiddle}; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].

The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its

own, rather more apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens

to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the

American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to

tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S.

The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII

(the 1963 version), which had these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation

characters.

The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde

serves for both (compare {angle brackets}).

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all

pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for

hexadecimal constants (in particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures, `$' in the 6502 world, `>'

Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor 28

at Texas Instruments, and `&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also {splat}.

The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other major languages makes the

designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a serious {misfeature} as the use of international networks

continues to increase (see {software rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody the

assumption that ASCII is the universal character set; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a

character set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating

`national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use a *smaller* subset common to all those in

use.

:ASCII art: n. The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+').

Also known as `character graphics' or `ASCII graphics'; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example:

o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||(

+-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+

A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit

Figure 1.

And here are some very silly examples:

|\/\/\/| ___/| _ |\/| ___ | | \ o.O| ACK! / \ |` '| / \ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \ | (o)(o) U / \ C ) () \/\/\/\ ____ /\/\/\/ |

,___| (oo) \/ \/ | / \/-------\ U (__) /____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo ) / \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\

Figure 2.

There is an important subgenre of humorous ASCII art that takes advantage of the names of the various

characters to tell a pun-based joke.

+--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |

+--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch "

Figure 3.

Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows.

Four of these are reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more:

(_) () (_) (\/) ($$) (**) /-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/ / | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love

Figure 4.

:attoparsec: n. `atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by 10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is

3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus 3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1

attoparsec/{microfortnight} equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to be in use (though probably not

very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See {micro-}.

:autobogotiphobia: /aw'to-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See {bogotify}.

:automagically: /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/ adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some

Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor 29