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param /p -ram'/ n. Shorthand for 'parameter'. See also parm; compare arg, var. |
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parent message n. What a followup follows up. |
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parity errors pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error in RAM hardware. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and serial communication lines; this is more serious because not always correctable. |
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Parkinson's Law of Data prov. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars also tends to double about once every 12 months (see Moore's Law); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely. |
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parm /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of param. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym arg is favored among hackers. Compare arg, var. |
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parse [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." ''I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A parsed fish has been deboned. There is some controversy over whether unparsed should mean 'bony', or also mean 'deboned'. |
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Pascal n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 196768 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students |
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