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ITS's 'lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter. |
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bagbiting adj. Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare losing, cretinous, bletcherous, 'barfucious' (under barfulous) and 'chomping' (under chomp). |
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balloonian variable n. [Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of 'boolean variable'?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state, but must nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical balloonian variable started out as a flag attached to some environment feature that either became obsolete or was planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it were live. |
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bamf /bamf/ 1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in virtual reality (esp. MUD) electronic fora when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2. The sound of magical transformation, used in virtual reality fora like MUDs. 3. In MUD circles, "bamf" is also used to refer to the act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the MUD client to switch its connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site to just bamf people over to our new location."). 4. Used by MUDders on occasion in a more general sense related to sense 3, to refer to directing someone to another location or resource (''A user was asking about some technobabble so I bamfed them to http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.") |
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banana label n. The labels often used on the sides of macrotape reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence. |
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banana problem n. [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell 'banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare fencepost error). One may say there is a banana problem of an algorithm with poorly defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also creeping elegance, creeping featuritis). See item 176 under HAKMEM, which describes a banana |
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