WhatIs

/ōld färt/

n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) USENETters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in sig blocks attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of pride in first person.

/ȯf-ˈlīn/

adv. Not now or not here.

"Let's take this discussion offline."

Specifically used on USENET to suggest that a discussion be taken off a public newsgroup to email.

/ȯf-bī-wən er-ər/

n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice versa, or by writing '< N' instead of '<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the person next to the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with fencepost error, which is properly a particular subtype of it.

/ȯf t͟hə trä-lē/

adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually crash or abort.

See glitch, bug, deep space.

/äk-tᵊl fȯr-tē/

n. Hackish way of saying

"I'm drawing a blank."

Octal 40 is the ASCII space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, hex 40 (01000000) is the EBCDIC space character.

See wall.

/äb-skyu̇r/

adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility.

"The reason for that last crash is obscure."

"The 'find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!"

The phrase moderately obscure implies that it could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The construction obscure in the extreme is the preferred emphatic form.

/əb-jek-sh(ə-)nə-bəl sē/

n. Hackish take on Objective-C, the name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the Right Thing without actually doing so.

/ōbē-wän er-ər/

[RPI, from off-by-one and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in Star Wars]

n. A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1. A kind of off-by-one error.

See also zeroth.

/äb-fə-skāt'd sē kən-test/

n. An annual contest run since 1984 over USENET by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are awarded at the judges' whim. C's terse syntax and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how *not* to code in C.

/ob/

pref. Obligatory. A piece of netiquette acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing particularly to do with sex, the author may append 'ObSex' (or 'Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great winnitude when your Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.