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flavor n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See vanilla. 2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful. Usually used in the phrase ''yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See vanilla. This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) however, hackish use of flavor at MIT predated QCD. 3. The term for 'class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system. Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS facility), the term flavor is still used as a general synonym for 'class' by some LISP hackers. |
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flavorful adj. Full of flavor (sense 2); esthetically pleasing. See random and losing for antonyms. See also the entries for taste and elegant. |
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flippy /flip'ee/ n. A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for the second side to be accessible. No longer common. |
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flood v. [IRC] To dump large amounts of text onto an IRC channel. This is especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users are trying to carry on a serious conversation. |
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flowchart n. [techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows and 'speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with COBOL programmers, card wallopers, and other lower forms of life. This attitude follows from the observations that flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of view) are no easier to read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it, or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code). See also pdl, sense 3. |
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flower key n. [Mac users] See feature key. |
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flush v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. "All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush (3) call. This is not an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a day's |
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