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instance (an "exception"), or allow as many as the user wants address space and memory permitting. |
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The logic behind this rule is that there are often situations where it makes clear sense to allow one of something instead of none. However, if one decides to go further and allow N (for N1), then why not N+1? And if N+1, then why not N+2, and so on? Once above 1, there's no excuse not to allow any N; hence, infinity. |
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Many hackers recall in this connection Isaac Asimov's SF novel The Gods Themselves in which a character announces that the number 2 is impossible if you're going to believe in more than one universe, you might as well believe in an infinite number of them. |
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zeroth /zee'roth/ adj. First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1, , 255 and the digital devices known as 'counters' count in this way. |
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Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication 'Chapter 0', especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First Edition of K&R). In recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce fencepost errors, though it cannot eliminate them entirely. |
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zigamorph /zig'i-morf/ n. 1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops. 2. [proposed] n. The Unicode non-character U+FFFF (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode (a subset of ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's writing systems, including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Thai, Laotian and many other languages (support for elvish is planned for a future release). |
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zip vt. [primarily MS-DOS] To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as follows: "I'll zip it up and send it to you." See tar and feather. |
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zipperhead n. [IBM] A person with a closed mind. |
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