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'El Camino Double Precision' but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it 'El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See bignum.) |
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In recent years, the synonym El Camino Virtual has been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley. |
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[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact he ESR] |
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elder days n. The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the PDP-10, TECO, ITS, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. Compare Iron Age; see also elvish and Great Worm, the. |
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elegant adj. [from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than 'clever', 'winning', or even cuspy. |
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The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, probably best known for his classic children's book The Little Prince, was also an aircraft designer. He gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." |
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elephantine adj. Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs (owing perhaps to poor design founded on brute force and ignorance) and exceedingly hairy in source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program. Usage: semi-humorous. Compare 'has the elephant nature' and the somewhat more pejorative monstrosity. See also second-system effect and baroque. |
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elevator controller n. An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like toaster (which superseded it). During one period (198384) in the deliberations of ANSI X3Jll (the C standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid, memory-limited computation environment. "You can't require printf (3) to be part of the default runtime library what if you're targeting an elevator controller?" Elevator controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both sides of several holy wars. |
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