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A Turing tar-pit is any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare bondage-and-discipline language. 2. The perennial holy wars over whether language A or B is the "most powerful". |
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turist /too'rist/ n. Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, 'turistic'. Poss. influenced by luser and 'Turing'. |
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tweak vt. 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging. 2. To tune or bum a program; preferred usage in the U.K. |
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tweeter n. [University of Waterloo] Syn. perf, chad (sense 1). This term (like woofer) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972 but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi. |
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TWENEX /twe'neks/ n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that krans meant 'funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply 'wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of 'twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written |
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