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pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. |
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peon n. A person with no special (root or wheel) privileges on a computer system. "I can't create an account on foovax for you; I'm only a peon there." |
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percent-S /per-sent' es'/ n. [From the code in C's printf (3) library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] An unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare random. |
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perf /perf/ n. Syn. chad (sense 1). The term perfory /per'f -ree/ is also heard. The term perf may also refer to the perforations themselves, rather than the chad they produce when torn (philatelists use it this way). |
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perfect programmer syndrome n. Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their perceptions may be distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving toy problems). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but I'll never type rm -r / while in root mode." |
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Perl /perl/ n. [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (lwall@jpl.nasa.gov, author of patch(1) and rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. Unix sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the languages of choice. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about lex(1), as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also Camel Book. |
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person of no account n. [University of California at Santa Cruz] Used when referring to a person with no network address, frequently to forestall confusion. Most often as part of an introduction: "This is Bill, a person of no account, but he used to be bill@random.com". Compare return from the dead. |
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pessimal /pes'im-l/ adj. [Latin-based antonym for 'optimal'] Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." Also pessimize vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for optimal and optimize, |
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