WhatIs

/bə-fər ō-vər-ˈflō/

n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see overrun), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.

/buh'kee bits/

n. 1. obs. The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard, resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see space-cadet keyboard).

2. By extension, bits associated with 'extra' shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and option keys on a Macintosh.

/bə-bəl sȯrt/

n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries 'bubble upward' in the list until they bump into one with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm.

/B-S-D/

n. [acronym for Berkeley System Distribution] a family of UNIX versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features.

/brüt fȯrs {ən(d), (ˈ)an(d)} ig-n(ə-)rən(t)s/

n. A popular design technique at many software houses -- brute force coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage it. Characteristic of early larval stage programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI:

"Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI."

/brüt fȯrs/

adj. Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying na"ive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones.

/B-R-S/

n. Syn. Big Red Switch. This abbreviation is fairly common online.

/bru̇ks lȯ/

prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" -- a result of the fact that the advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost associated with coordinating and then merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N).

/broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket'/

[by analogy with 'bracket': a 'broken bracket']

n. Either of the characters '<' and '>', when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase 'broken bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in the Real World as well, these are usually called angle brackets.)

/brō-kən {er-(ˌ)ō, ˈa-(ˌ)rō}/

[IBM] n. The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including connection to a down computer). On a PC, simulated with '->/_', with the two center characters overstruck. In true luser fashion, the original documentation of these codes (visible on every 3270 terminal, and necessary for debugging network problems) was confined to an IBM customer engineering manual.