WhatIs

/gēf/

v. [ostensibly from gefingerpoken] vt. Syn. mung.

See also blinkenlights.

/g*-don'kn/

adj. Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested. 'Gedanken' is a German word for 'thought'. A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term 'gedanken experiment' is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because you can reason about it theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but you have to be careful.

/jee'kohs/

n. See GCOS.

/jee'kohs/

n. A quick-and-dirty clone of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing.

/G-C/

[from LISP terminology; 'Garbage Collect']

1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent to GFR.

2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.

3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process.

/ga-sē-əs/

adj. Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).

/gas/

[as in gas chamber]

1. interj. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation.

"Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!"

2. interj. A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy.

"The system's getting wedged every few minutes. Gas!"

3. vt. To flush (sense 1).

/gar'plee/

[Stanford]

n. Another meta-syntactic variable (see foo); once popular among SAIL hackers.

/gär-bij kä-likt/

vi. (also garbage collection, n.)

See GC.

/gaŋ baŋ/

n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's 'Hackers'), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines and produce enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in orthogonality.