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subsequently encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama. |
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line 666 [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that somebody is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size." |
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line eater, the n. obs. [Usenet] 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the line eater, and postings often included a dummy line of line eater food. Ironically, line eater 'food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if there was a space or tab before it, then the line eater would eat the food and the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of sacrificing to the line eater continued for some time after the bug had been nailed to the wall, and is still humorously referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991. 2. See NSA line eater. |
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line noise n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits, electrical storms, cosmic rays, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is TECO; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from line noise." Other non-WYSIWYG editors, such as Multics qed and Unix ed, in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as INTERCAL. |
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line starve [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move |
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