Splat

/splat/

n. 

1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ('*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the squashed-bug appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.
2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the # character (ASCII 0100011).
3. [Rochester Institute of Technology] The command key on a Mac (same as ALT, sense 2).

4. [Stanford] Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character.

   This character is also called blobby and frob, among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for tensor product.

5. [Stanford] Name for the semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character.

6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs whatever the local interpretation of splat is.

   With ITS and WAITS gone, senses 4-6 are now nearly obsolete.

   See also ASCII.