WhatIs

/wȯrt/

n. A small, crock-y feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh(1), single quotes literalize every character inside them except !. In ANSI C, the ?? syntax used obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart.

See also miswart.

/wȯrm büt/

n. See boot.

/wä-nə-bē/

(also, more plausibly, spelled wannabe)

[from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang]

/waŋk/

[Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. wank, to masturbate]

/waŋ-gȯ/

n. Random bit-level grovelling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with mumble. For example:
"You start with the '.o' file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wango -- and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable."

/wȯl-pā-pər/

n. 

/wȯl tīm/

n. (also wall clock time) 

1. Real world time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time.
2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of clocks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these will differ, as no one program gets all the clocks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).

/wȯl fä-lə-wər/

n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls Harvey Wallbanger, the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a finger on one wall and running till it came out the other end.

/wȯl/

[WPI]

interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??"

2. A request for further explication.

Compare octal forty.

/wȯ-kiŋ drīvz/

n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to 'walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time.