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is used instead of foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar, foobar, quux. |
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walk n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in core. See also codewalker, silly walk, clobber. |
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walk off the end of vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an off-by-one error. Compare clobber, roach, smash the stack. |
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walking drives n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to 'walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races. |
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wall interj. [WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty. 3. [Unix, from 'write all'] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility. |
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It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom 'like talking to a blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing "Wall?" themselves. |
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wall follower n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls 'Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a 'finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazesand, in fact, Harvey outperformed |
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