The New Hacker's Dictionary
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tool 1. n.
A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose [13504]app, [13505]operating system. 2. [Unix] An application program with a simple, `transparent' (typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see [13506]filter, [13507]plumbing). 3. [MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set one's brain to the grindstone". See [13508]hack. 4. n. [MIT] A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name "Tool and Die".)
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toolsmith n.
The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the [13512]tools with which other programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see [13513]uninteresting. Jon Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter of his book "More Programming Pearls", quotes Dick Sites from [13514]DEC as saying "I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs".
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toor n.
The Bourne-Again Super-user. An alternate account with UID of 0, created on Unix machines where the root user has an inconvenient choice of shell. Compare [13518]avatar.
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topic drift n.
Term used on GEnie, Usenet and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a [13522]thread to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. The header in each post can be changed to keep current with the posts, but usually isn't due to forgetfulness or laziness. A single post may often result in several posts each responding to a different point in the original. Some subthreads will actually be in response to some off-the-cuff side comment, possibly degenerating into a [13523]flame war, or just as often evolving into a separate discussion. Hence, discussions aren't really so much threads as they are trees. Except that they don't really have leaves, or multiple branching roots; usually some lines of discussion will just sort of die off after everyone gets tired of them. This could take anywhere from hours to weeks, or even longer.
The term `topic drift' is often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now that's topic drift!"
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topic group n.
Syn. [13527]forum.
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TOPS-10 /tops-ten/ n.
[13531]DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled [13532]PDP-10 machines, long a favorite of hackers but now effectively extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see Appendix A. See also [13533]ITS, [13534]TOPS-20, [13535]TWENEX, [13536]VMS, [13537]operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from `bottoms-ten') as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.
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TOPS-20 /tops-twen'tee/ n.
See [13541]TWENEX.
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tourist n.
1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for [13545]comm mode, email, games, and
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other trivial purposes. One step below [13546]luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this [13547]turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with [13548]luser (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms, and-or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare [13549]twink, [13550]lurker, [13551]read-only user. 2. [IRC] An [13552]IRC user who goes from channel to channel without saying anything; see [13553]channel hopping.
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tourist information n.
Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix ps(1) display.
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touristic adj.
Having the quality of a [13560]tourist. Often used as a pejorative, as in `losing touristic scum'. Often spelled `turistic' or `turistik', so that phrase might be more properly rendered `lusing turistic scum'.
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toy n.
A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. `nice toy': One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately. 2. `just a toy': A machine that yields insufficient [13564]computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is [13565]bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a `toy', and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also [13566]Get a real computer!.
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toy language n.
A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. [13570]Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see [13571]bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is [13572]Pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also [13573]MFTL.
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toy problem n.
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[AI] A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively. See also [13577]gedanken, [13578]toy program.
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toy program n.
1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare [13582]noddy). 2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle. See also [13583]noddy.
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trampoline n.
An incredibly [13587]hairy technique, found in some [13588]HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes, trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent to a process. hese pieces of [13589]live data are called `trampolines'. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also [13590]snap.
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trap
1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program. 2. vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions."
This term is associated with assembler programming (`interrupt' or `exception' is more common among [13594]HLL programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see [13595]system, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).
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trap door n.
(alt. `trapdoor') 1. Syn. [13599]back door -- a [13600]Bad Thing. 2. [techspeak] A `trap-door function' is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are [13601]Good Things with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems.
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trash vt.
To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including [13605]mung, [13606]mangle, and [13607]scribble.
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trawl v.
To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest.
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tree-killer n.
[Sun] 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper' includes the production of [13614]spiffy but [13615]content-free documents. Thus, most [13616]suits are tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet `tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" (see also [13617]elvish, [13618]elder days).
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treeware /tree'weir/ n.
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Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare [13622]tree-killer, see [13623]documentation.
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trit /trit/ n.
[by analogy with `bit'] One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also [13627]bit). Trits arise, for example, in the context of a [13628]flag that should actually be able to assume three values -- such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called `3-state bits'. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as `a bit and a half', although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log2(3) bits).
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trivial adj.
1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly [13632]cretinous would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish `trivial' usually evaluates to `I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See [13633]nontrivial, [13634]uninteresting.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined `trivial theorem' as "one that has already been proved".
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troff /T'rof/ or /trof/ n.
[Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the [13638]Multics and [13639]CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (that name came from the expression "to run off a copy"). A companion program, [13640]nroff, formats output for terminals and line printers.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work ("A Typesetter-independent troff," AT&T CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the program's "obvious deficiencies -- a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire.
The success of [13641]TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced troff's relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured troff a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long run, hackers most admire.
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