WhatIs

/ef dee leek/

n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a core leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors ('fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them.

See leak.

/fȯl-tē/

adj. Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing, q.v., but the connotation is much milder.

/fa-shist/

adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant 'fascistic' seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with 'touristic' (see tourist).

/fär-miŋ/

[Adelaide University, Australia]

n. What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a crash. Typically used as follows:

"Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard drive hasn't gone farming again."

/fa'kl/

n. Syn. FAQ List.

/F-A-Q list/

[USENET]

n. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall Frequently Asked Questions. This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one kind of lore, although it is far too big for a regular posting. Examples:

"What is the proper type of NULL?"

and

"What's that funny name for the '#' character?"

/fan-ˈdaŋ-(ˌ)gō ȯn kȯr/

[UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance]

n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the malloc(3) arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have 'done a fandango on core'. On low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted.

/fȯl thrü/

v. (n. 'fallthrough', var. 'fall-through') 1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be *really* old, dating from the 1940s and 1950s.

2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or some other distant portion of code.

/fȯl ō-vər/

[IBM]

vi. Yet another synonym for crash or lose. 'Fall over hard' equates to crash and burn.

/fak-tər/

n. See coefficient.