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the Right Thing. In cases where 'the good is the enemy of the best', the merely good although good is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong Thing." |
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wugga wugga /wuh'g wuh'g/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare cruncha cruncha cruncha, grind (sense 4). |
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wumpus /wuhm'ps/ n. The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back at least to 1972 (several years before ADVENT) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and Möbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five 'crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added 'anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). |
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This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a superbat colony). Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the Mac. A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, @url{http://www.ccil.org/retro}. |
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WYSIAYG /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is All You Get"; an unhappy variant of WYSIWYG. Visual, 'point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors, word processors, and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG 'desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for creating small documents |
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