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Jeff Lowery scripsit:
> Reminds when I first saw a BLOB column in a database schema at Boeing and
> asked what it was. Turns out it stood for Boeing Large Object BLOB.
recursive acronym: n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is
to choose acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves
or to other acronyms/abbreviations. The original of the breed may have
been TINT ()B“TINT Is Not TECO”). The classic examples were two MIT
editors called EINE ()B“EINE Is Not EMACS”) and ZWEI (“ZWEI Was EINE
Initially)B”). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar
Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU (q.v., sense 1) stands for )B“GNU's
Not Unix!)B” — and a company with the name Cygnus, which expands
to )B“Cygnus, Your GNU Support” (though Cygnus people say this is a
backronym). The GNU recursive acronym may have been patterned on XINU,
)B“XINU Is Not Unix” — a particularly nice example because it is a
mirror image, a backronym, and a recursive acronym. See also mung, EMACS.
mung: /muhng/, vt. [in 1960 at MIT, )B“Mash Until No Good”;
sometime after that the derivation from the recursive acronym )B“Mung
Until No Good)B” became standard; but see munge] [definitions omitted]
EMACS: /ee´maks/, n. [in part] Indeed, some hackers find EMACS
too heavyweight and baroque for their taste, and expand the name as
)B‘Escape Meta Alt Control Shift’ to spoof its heavy reliance
on keystrokes decorated with bucky bits. Other spoof expansions include
)B‘Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping’ (from when that
was a lot of core), )B‘Eventually malloc()s All Computer Storage’,
and )B‘EMACS Makes A Computer Slow’.
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BALIN FUNDINUL UZBAD KHAZADDUMU jcowan@reutershealth.com
BALIN SON OF FUNDIN LORD OF KHAZAD-DUM http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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