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flap vt. 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap ). Old-time hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and microtapes were 1, 2, and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging inside a cabinet near the disk. 2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. See also macrotape. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.) |
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flarp /flarp/ n. [Rutgers University] Yet another metasyntactic variable (see foo). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that any program not containing the word flarp somewhere will not work. The legend is discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which do contain the magic word. |
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flat adj. 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is flatten. 2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680×0) that is one big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a segmented architecture (like that of the 80×86) in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered cretinous). |
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Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a Good Thing. |
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flat-ASCII adj. Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter markup language, or output device, and no meta-characters). Syn. plan-ASCII. Compare flat-file. |
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flat-file adj. A flattened representation of some database or tree or network structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in flat-ASCII form. See also sharchive. |
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flatten vt. To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to flat-ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent canonical form." |
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