The New Hacker's Dictionary

901

regexp /reg'eksp/ n.

[Unix] (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex') 1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by Unix utilities such as grep(1), sed(1), and awk(1). These use conventions similar to but more elaborate than those described under [11218]glob. For purposes of this lexicon, it is sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets using ^; thus, one can specify `any non-alphabetic character' with [^A-Za-z]. 2. Name of a well-known PD regexp-handling package in portable C, written by revered Usenetter Henry Spencer [11219]<henry@zoo.toronto.edu>.

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register dancing n.

Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers, because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem, like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed.

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903

The hijacking of a third party's unsecured mail server to deliver [11237]spam.

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religion of CHI /ki:/ n.

[Case Western Reserve University] Yet another hackish parody religion (see also [11241]Church of the SubGenius, [11242]Discordianism). In the mid-70s, the canonical "Introduction to Programming" courses at CWRU were taught in Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a Univac 1108 system using a homebrew operating system named CHI. The religion had no doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the worshipper noted that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she would recite the phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN." The last five words were the first five functions in the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special pronunciations /obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more common /ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn of 11:08's arrival was [11243]considered harmful.

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religious issues n.

Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off [11247]holy wars, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See [11248]holy wars; see also [11249]theology, [11250]bigot.

904

This term is a prime example of [11251]ha ha only serious. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble [11252]Get a life! and leave -- unless, of course, one's own unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed.

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replicator n.

Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see [11256]meme), a program (see [11257]quine, [11258]worm, [11259]wabbit, [11260]fork bomb, and [11261]virus), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see [11262]life, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or [11263]nanobot. It is even claimed by some that [11264]Unix and [11265]C are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see [11266]Unix conspiracy.

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reply n.

See [11270]followup.

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905

restriction n.

A [11274]bug or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a [11275]feature. Often used (esp. by [11276]marketroid types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false).

Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number -- on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less [11277]flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect.

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retcon /ret'kon/

[short for `retroactive continuity', from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics] 1. n. The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a new story `reveals' things about events in previous stories, usually leaving the `facts' the same (thus preserving continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon. 2. vt. To write such a story about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in "The Empire Strikes

906

Back".

[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. --ESR]

[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics. In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. --ESR]

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RETI v.

Syn. [11284]RTI

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retrocomputing /ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ n.

Refers to emulations of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for [11288]hack value, of more `serious' designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the pnch(6) or bcd(6) program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding pattern in [11289]punched card code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have included the programming language [11290]INTERCAL, a

907

[11291]JCL-emulating shell for Unix, the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless [11292]Zork binary running.

A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at the Retrocomputing Museum, [11293]http://www.ccil.org/retro.

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return from the dead v.

To regain access to the net after a long absence. Compare [11297]person of no account.

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RFC /R-F-C/ n.

[Request For Comment] One of a long-established series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Perhaps the single most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain known as RFCs even once adopted as standards.

908

The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO. Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing tradition of `joke' RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman, UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1 April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon.

The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work -- they manage to have neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions.

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RFE /R-F-E/ n.

1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement (compare [11304]RFC). 2. [from `Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the ethernet.

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909

rib site n.

[by analogy with [11308]backbone site] A machine that has an on-demand high-speed link to a [11309]backbone site and serves as a regional distribution point for lots of third-party traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare [11310]leaf site, [11311]backbone site.

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rice box n.

[from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an 80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards.

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Right Thing n.

That which is compellingly the correct or appropriate thing to use, do, say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree. "What's the right thing for LISP to do when it sees (mod a 0)? Should it return a, or give a divide-by-0 error?" Oppose [11318]Wrong Thing.

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910

rip v.

1. To extract the digital representation of a piece of music from an audio CD. Software that does this is often called a "CD ripper". 2. [Amiga hackers] To extract sound or graphics from a program that they have been compiled/assembled into, or which generates them at run-time. In the case of older Amiga games this entails searching through memory shortly after a reboot. This sense has been in use for many years and probably gave rise to the (now more common) sense 1.

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ripoff n.

Synonym for [11325]chad, sense 1.

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RL // n.

[MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's player is laughing. Compare [11329]meatspace; oppose [11330]VR.

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roach vt.

[Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets [11334]toasted or [11335]fried, software gets roached.