WhatIs

/trap/

1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.

2. vi. To cause a trap.
"These instructions trap to the monitor."

Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap.
"The monitor traps all input/output instructions."

/tram-pə-lēn/

n. An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. These pieces of live data are called 'trampolines'.

/tȯi prō-gram/

n. 1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare noddy).

2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle.

See also noddy.

/tȯi prä-bləm/

[AI]

n. A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively.

See also gedanken, toy program.

/tȯi laŋ-gwij/

n. A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is Pascal.

/tȯi/

n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers.

1. 'nice toy': One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately.

2. 'just a toy': A machine that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a 'toy', and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards.

/tu̇r-is-tik/

adj. Having the quality of a tourist. Often used as a pejorative, as in losing touristic scum. Often spelled turistic or turistik, so that phrase might be more properly rendered lusing turistic scum.

/tu̇r-ist in-fər-mā-shən/

n. Information in an online display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The 'bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a UNIX ps(1) display.

/tu̇r-ist/

[ITS]

n. A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm-mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. Hackers often spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this also expresses the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms).

Compare twink, read-only user.

/tō-tō/

n. This is reported to be the default scratch file name among French-speaking programmers -- in other words, a francophone foo.