The gon File, 4.0.0 | Page 4

otherwise cause a program to {choke}, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called `ad-hackery', `ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), `ad-crockery'. See also {ELIZA effect}.
:Ada:: /n./ A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, {elephantine} bulk.
:adger: /aj'r/ /vt./ [UCLA mutant of {nadger}, poss. from the middle name of an infamous {tenured graduate student}] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare {dumbass attack}.
:admin: /ad-min'/ /n./ Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare {postmaster}, {sysop}, {system mangler}.
:ADVENT: /ad'vent/ /n./ The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the {PDP-10} in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. Now better known as Adventure, but the {{TOPS-10}} operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also {vadding}, {Zork}, and {Infocom}.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words' {xyzzy} and {plugh} also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
:AFAIK: // /n./ [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
:AFJ: // /n./ Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; see {kremvax} for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the *only* seasonal holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other hacker networks.
:AI: /A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
:AI-complete: /A-I k*m-pleet'/ /adj./ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see {NP-})] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1996) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See also {gedanken}.
:AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./ A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under {AI Koans} in Appendix A). See also {ha ha only serious}, {mu}, and {{hacker humor}}.
:AIDS: /aydz/ /n./ Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a {glob} pattern that matches, but is not limited to, Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing unsafe {SEX}. See {virus}, {worm}, {Trojan horse}, {virgin}.
:AIDX: /ayd'k*z/ /n./ Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded "hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix stream ({BSD} and {USG Unix}) became a