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that it was bad luck overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck overpowering your own). |
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Foo index and coefficient of foo both tend to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that 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 a high 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 say bogosity index. |
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cokebottle /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because 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 as cokebottle. See also quadruple bucky. |
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COME FROM n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the 'go to'; COME FROM label 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. Lawrence 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-raging 'structured 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 |
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