WhatIs

/līn ēt-ər, t͟hə/

[USENET]

/L-N-J-T-A-T/

adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain.

"Trying to display the 'prettiest' arrangement of nodes and arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what 'prettiest' means algorithmically."

/L-K-D-W-D-T-B/

adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes.

"Well, you *could* write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach."

See also fear and loathing.

/līt pīp/

n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.

/līf/

n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ('Scientific American', October 1970). Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!; see Gosperism).

/leksə-ˌfāj/

n. A notorious word chomper on ITS.

See bagbiter.

/leksə(r)/

n. Common hacker shorthand for lexical analyzer, the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces). 

"Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound ops like '=-'."

/le-tərbäm/

n. A piece of email containing live data intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power to unwedge them. Under UNIX, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could range from silly to tragic.

/let t͟hə smōk au̇t/

v. To fry hardware (see fried).

See magic smoke for the mythology behind this.

/lərp/

vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun for the operation. E.g., Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two endpoints of the line.