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snail-mail n. Paper mail, as opposed to electronic. Sometimes written as the single word 'SnailMail'. One's postal address is, correspondingly, a snail address. Derives from earlier coinage 'USnail' (from 'U.S. Mail'), for which there have even been parody posters and stamps made. Also (less commonly) called 'P-mail', from 'paper mail' or 'physical mail'. Oppose email. |
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snap v. To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to replace an old address with the forwarding address found there. If you telephone the main number for an institution and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell you that person's extension before connecting you, in the hopes that you will snap your pointer and dial direct next time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a straight line from first to last. See chase pointers. |
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Often, the behavior of a trampoline is to perform an error check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error check). In this context one also speaks of snapping links. For example, in a LISP implementation, a function interface trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call instruction with no further overhead. |
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snarf /snarf/ vt. 1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission. See also BLT. 2. [in the Unix community] To fetch a file or set of files across a network. See also blast. This term was mainstream in the late 1960s, meaning 'to eat piggishly'. It may still have this connotation in context. "He's in the snarfing phase of hacking FTPing megs of stuff a day." 3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing). "They were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them." 4. Syn. for slurp. "This program starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then. '' 5. [GEnie] To spray food or programming fluids due to laughing at the wrong moment. "I was drinking coffee, and when I read your post I snarfed all over my desk." "If I keep reading this topic, I think I'll have to snarfproof my computer with a keyboard condom." [This sense appears to be widespread among mundane teenagers ESR] |
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snarf & barf /snarf'n-barf'/ n. Under a WIMP environment, the act of grabbing a region of text and then stuffing the contents of that region into another region (or the same one) to avoid retyping a command line. In the |
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