WhatIs

/test/

n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup of the results.

2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent.

See also demo.

/tər-mə-nāt print līn/ or /ter'prē/

[from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)]

vi. To output a newline. Now rare as jargon, though still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of TERminate PRInt line, named for the fact that, on early OSes, no characters would be printed until a complete line was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the output.

/tər-mə-nᵊl jəŋ-kē/

[UK]

/tər-mə-nᵊl il-nəs/

n. 1. Syn. raster burn.

2. The burn-in condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.

/tər-mə-nᵊl brān deth/

n. The extreme form of terminal illness (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.

/tər-mə-nak/

[Caltech, ca. 1979]

n. Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the 'L' key to produce the 'K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like

"Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix."

See sun-stools, Telerat, HP-SUX.

/ter-ə-fläp kləb/

[FLOP = Floating Point Operation]

n. A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder.

/ter-ə-/

[SI]

pref. See quantifiers.

/ten-yərd gra-jə-wāt stü-dᵊnt/

n. One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6): a ten-yeared student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor.

/ten(t)s/

adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU:

"This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes."

A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.