baroness

a noblewoman who holds the rank of baron or who is the wife or widow of a baron

— Princeton's WordNet

Vavasor

the vassal or tenant of a baron; one who held under a baron, and who also had tenants under him; one in dignity next to a baron; a title of dignity next to a baron

— Webster Dictionary

Barony

the fee or domain of a baron; the lordship, dignity, or rank of a baron

— Webster Dictionary

Gerry

A diminutive of the male given names Gerald and Gerard.

— Wiktionary

Pascal

The Pascal programming language.

— Wiktionary

Pascal compiler

a compiler for programs written in Pascal

— Princeton's WordNet

Delphi

A programming language based on PASCAL.

— Wiktionary

Pascal

The French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal.

— Wiktionary

Goutwort

a coarse umbelliferous plant of Europe (Aegopodium Podagraria); -- called also bishop's weed, ashweed, and herb gerard

— Webster Dictionary

Garrett

, transferred from the surname, or in Ireland directly from Gerard.

— Wiktionary

millipascal

A unit equal to one thousandth of a pascal (symbol mPa).

— Wiktionary

Si

A diminutive of the male given name Simon.

— Wiktionary

Stanford-Binet test

revision of the Binet-Simon Scale

— Princeton's WordNet

baronial

suitable for a baron

— Wiktionary

Sim

A male given name, diminutive of Simon and Simeon.

— Wiktionary

Lima/on

a curve of the fourth degree, invented by Pascal. Its polar equation is r = a cos / + b

— Webster Dictionary

Simmons

A southern English patronymic surname from the given name Simon.

— Wiktionary

Rabelaisian

of or relating to or characteristic of Francois Rabelais or his works

— Princeton's WordNet

Verulam

Baron Verulam, Viscount St Albans

— Wiktionary

rix-baron

A baron of the German Empire.

— Wiktionary

baronetcy

the title of a baron

— Princeton's WordNet

barony

the estate of a baron

— Princeton's WordNet

barony

the domain of a baron

— Princeton's WordNet

thane

a feudal lord or baron

— Princeton's WordNet

Fermat, Pierre de Fermat

French mathematician who founded number theory; contributed (with Pascal) to the theory of probability (1601-1665)

— Princeton's WordNet

Fermat, Pierre de Fermat

French mathematician who founded number theory; contributed (with Pascal) to the theory of probability (1601-1665)

— Princeton's WordNet

Simpson

A Scottish and northern English patronymic surname derived from Sim, the short form of Simon.

— Wiktionary

Red Baron

An equivalent of the Red Baron, ace fighter pilot.

— Wiktionary

viscount

a British peer who ranks below an earl and above a baron

— Princeton's WordNet

viscount

A member of the peerage above a baron but below a count or earl.

— Wiktionary

Bolivia, Republic of Bolivia

a landlocked republic in central South America; Simon Bolivar founded Bolivia in 1825 after winning independence from Spain

— Princeton's WordNet

Bolivia, Republic of Bolivia

a landlocked republic in central South America; Simon Bolivar founded Bolivia in 1825 after winning independence from Spain

— Princeton's WordNet

Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc

son and successor of Francois Duvalier as president of Haiti; he was overthrown by a mass uprising in 1986 (born in 1951)

— Princeton's WordNet

Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc

son and successor of Francois Duvalier as president of Haiti; he was overthrown by a mass uprising in 1986 (born in 1951)

— Princeton's WordNet

Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Baby Doc

son and successor of Francois Duvalier as president of Haiti; he was overthrown by a mass uprising in 1986 (born in 1951)

— Princeton's WordNet

baronet, Bart

a member of the British order of honor; ranks below a baron but above a knight

— Princeton's WordNet

baronet, Bart

a member of the British order of honor; ranks below a baron but above a knight

— Princeton's WordNet

Simon says

A children's game where players must carry out only those commands that are preceded by the utterance "Simon says".

— Wiktionary

Monod, Jacques Monod, Jacques Lucien Monod

French biochemist who (with Francois Jacob) explained how genes are activated and suggested the existence of messenger RNA (1910-1976)

— Princeton's WordNet

Monod, Jacques Monod, Jacques Lucien Monod

French biochemist who (with Francois Jacob) explained how genes are activated and suggested the existence of messenger RNA (1910-1976)

— Princeton's WordNet

Monod, Jacques Monod, Jacques Lucien Monod

French biochemist who (with Francois Jacob) explained how genes are activated and suggested the existence of messenger RNA (1910-1976)

— Princeton's WordNet

Baronial

pertaining to a baron or a barony

— Webster Dictionary

peer

a nobleman (duke or marquis or earl or viscount or baron) who is a member of the British peerage

— Princeton's WordNet

Baronage

the dignity or rank of a baron

— Webster Dictionary

Baronage

the land which gives title to a baron

— Webster Dictionary

baroness

The female ruler of a barony. The male equivalent is baron.

— Wiktionary

Adrian, Edgar Douglas Adrian, Baron Adrian

English physiologist who conducted research into the function of neurons; 1st baron of Cambridge (1889-1997)

— Princeton's WordNet

Adrian, Edgar Douglas Adrian, Baron Adrian

English physiologist who conducted research into the function of neurons; 1st baron of Cambridge (1889-1997)

— Princeton's WordNet

Adrian, Edgar Douglas Adrian, Baron Adrian

English physiologist who conducted research into the function of neurons; 1st baron of Cambridge (1889-1997)

— Princeton's WordNet

nobleman

A peer; an aristocrat; ranks range from baron to king to emperor.

— Wiktionary

baronial

belonging or relating to a baron or barons

— Wiktionary

Colombia, Republic of Colombia

a republic in northwestern South America with a coastline on the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea; achieved independence from Spain in 1821 under the leadership of Simon Bolivar; Spanish is the official language

— Princeton's WordNet

Colombia, Republic of Colombia

a republic in northwestern South America with a coastline on the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea; achieved independence from Spain in 1821 under the leadership of Simon Bolivar; Spanish is the official language

— Princeton's WordNet

Laplace

Pierre-Simon Laplace, French mathematician 1749-1827, used attributively in the names of various mathematical concepts named after him (see "Derived terms" below)

— Wiktionary

barony

A dominion ruled by a baron or baroness, often part of a larger kingdom or empire.

— Wiktionary

Simonian

one of the followers of Simon Magus; also, an adherent of certain heretical sects in the early Christian church

— Webster Dictionary

Visual Basic

A programming language developed by Microsoft, broadly descended from BASIC and Pascal and later superseded by VB.NET, in which all programs have a graphical user interface.

— Wiktionary

Henry III

son of King John and king of England from 1216 to 1272; his incompetence aroused baronial opposition led by Simon de Montfort (1207-1272)

— Princeton's WordNet

Byron

George Gordon (Noel) Byron, 6th Baron Byron (January 22, 1788u2013April 19, 1824), a famous English poet and leading figure in romanticism.

— Wiktionary

Tolt

a writ by which a cause pending in a court baron was removed into a country court

— Webster Dictionary

Port-royalist

one of the dwellers in the Cistercian convent of Port Royal des Champs, near Paris, when it was the home of the Jansenists in the 17th century, among them being Arnauld, Pascal, and other famous scholars. Cf. Jansenist

— Webster Dictionary

Zohar

a Jewish cabalistic book attributed by tradition to Rabbi Simon ben Yochi, who lived about the end of the 1st century, a. d. Modern critics believe it to be a compilation of the 13th century

— Webster Dictionary

Baroness

a baron's wife; also, a lady who holds the baronial title in her own right; as, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts

— Webster Dictionary

Court-baron

an inferior court of civil jurisdiction, attached to a manor, and held by the steward; a baron's court; -- now fallen into disuse

— Webster Dictionary

Zohar

A Jewish cabalistic book attributed by tradition to Rabbi Simon ben Yochi, who lived about the end of the 1st century AD. Modern critics believe it to be a compilation of the 13th century.

— Wiktionary

Baron

a husband; as, baron and feme, husband and wife

— Webster Dictionary

Viscount

a nobleman of the fourth rank, next in order below an earl and next above a baron; also, his degree or title of nobility. See Peer, n., 3

— Webster Dictionary

Lord

A British aristocratic title used as a form of address for a marquess, earl or viscount; the usual style for a baron; a courtesy title for a younger son of a duke or marquess

— Wiktionary

Peer

a nobleman; a member of one of the five degrees of the British nobility, namely, duke, marquis, earl, viscount, baron; as, a peer of the realm

— Webster Dictionary

Brethren of the Common Life

a Dutch branch of the "Friends of God," founded at Deventer by Gerard Groote.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Saint-Simonian

a follower of the Count de St. Simon, who died in 1825, and who maintained that the principle of property held in common, and the just division of the fruits of common labor among the members of society, are the true remedy for the social evils which exist

— Webster Dictionary

Enfantin, Barthélemy Prosper

a Socialist and journalist, born in Paris, adopted the views of Saint-Simon (q. v.); held subversive views on the marriage laws, which involved him in some trouble; wrote a useful and sensible book on Algerian colonisation, and several works, mainly interpretative of the theories of Saint-Simon (1796-1864).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

St. Simonians

. See St. Simon, Comte de.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Baronet

a dignity or degree of honor next below a baron and above a knight, having precedency of all orders of knights except those of the Garter. It is the lowest degree of honor that is hereditary. The baronets are commoners

— Webster Dictionary

Napier's rods

a set of rods, made of bone or other material, each divided into nine spaces, and containing the numbers of a column of the multiplication table; -- a contrivance of Baron Napier, the inventor of logarithms, for facilitating the operations of multiplication and division

— Webster Dictionary

Domat, Jean

a learned French jurist and friend of Pascal, regarded laws and customs as the reflex of political history (1625-1696).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Louis XVII.

second son of the preceding, shut up in the Temple, was, after the execution of his mother, proclaimed king by the Emigrants, and handed over in his prison to the care of one Simon, a shoemaker, in service about the prison, to bring him up in the principles of Sansculottism; Simon taught him to drink, dance, and sing the carmagnole; he died in prison "amid squalor and darkness," his shirt not changed for six months (1785-1796).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

thane

in Anglo-Saxon England, a man holding lands from the king, or from a superior in rank. There were two orders, the king's thanes, who attended the kings in their courts and held lands immediately of them, and the ordinary thanes, who were lords of manors and who had particular jurisdiction within their limits. After the Norman Conquest, this title was no longer used, and baron took its place.

— Wiktionary

bondage and discipline language

A language (such as Pascal">Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of ‘right programming’ even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated ‘B&D’; thus, one may speak of things “having the B&D nature”. See Pascal">Pascal; oppose languages of choice.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Lady

a woman of social distinction or position. In England, a title prefixed to the name of any woman whose husband is not of lower rank than a baron, or whose father was a nobleman not lower than an earl. The wife of a baronet or knight has the title of Lady by courtesy, but not by right

— Webster Dictionary

Thane

a dignitary under the Anglo-Saxons and Danes in England. Of these there were two orders, the king's thanes, who attended the kings in their courts and held lands immediately of them, and the ordinary thanes, who were lords of manors and who had particular jurisdiction within their limits. After the Conquest, this title was disused, and baron took its place

— Webster Dictionary

Bossut, Charles

French mathematician, born near Lyons, confrère of the Encyclopaedists; his chief work "L'Histoire Générale des Mathématiques"; edited Pascal's works (1730-1814).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Barons' War

a war in England of the barons against Henry III., headed by Simon de Montfort, and which lasted from 1258 to 1265.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Dow

or Douw, Gerard, a distinguished Dutch genre-painter, born at Leyden; a pupil of Rembrandt; his works, which are very numerous, are the fruit of a devoted study of nature, and are remarkable for their delicacy and perfection of finish; examples of his works are found in all the great galleries of Europe (1613-1675).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Fermat, Pierre de

a French mathematician, born near Montauban; made important discoveries in the properties of numbers, and with his friend Pascal invented a calculus of probabilities; was held in high esteem by Hallam, who ranks him next to Descartes (1601-1665).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Nicole, Pierre

French divine and moralist, born at Chartres, a Port-Royalist (q. v.), friend of Arnauld and Pascal; was along with the former author of the famous "Port Royal Logic" (1625-1695).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Sanchez, Thomas

a Spanish casuist, born at Cordova; author of a treatise on the "Sacrament of Marriage," rendered notorious from the sarcastic treatment it received at the hands of Pascal and Voltaire (1550-1610).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Montfort, Simon de

son of a French count; came to England in 1230, where he inherited from his grandmother the earldom of Leicester; attached to Henry III., and married to the king's sister, he was sent to govern Gascony in 1248; returned in 1253, and passed over to the side of the barons, whom he ultimately led in the struggle against the king; after repeated unsuccessful attempts to make Henry observe the Provisions of Oxford, Simon took arms against him in 1263; the war was indecisive, and appeal being made to the arbitration of Louis the Good, Simon, dissatisfied with his award, renewed hostilities, defeated the king at Lewes, and taking him and his son prisoner, governed England for a year (1264-65); he sketched a constitution for the country, and summoned the most representative parliament that had yet met, but as he aimed at the welfare of not the barons only, but the common people as well, the barons began to distrust him, when Prince Edward, having escaped from captivity, joined them, and overthrew Simon at Evesham, where he was slain (1206?-1265).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Breton de los Herreros

Spanish poet and dramatist; wrote comedies and satires in an easy, flowing style (1800-1873).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Clermont Ferrand

the ancient capital of Auvergne and chief town of the dep. Puy-de-Dôme; the birthplace of Pascal, Gregory of Tours, and Dessaix, and where, in 1095, Pope Urban II. convoked a council and decided on the first Crusade; it has been the scene of seven Church Councils.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Chéruel, Adolphe

French historian, born at Rouen; author of "History of France during the Minority of Louis XIV."; published the "Memoirs of Saint-Simon" (1809-1891).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

David, Félicien

a French composer, born at Vaucluse; author, among other compositions, of the "Desert," a production which achieved an instant and complete triumph; was in his youth an ardent disciple of St. Simon (1810-1876).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Bethencourt

a Norman baron, in 1425 discovered and conquered the Canaries, and held them as a fief of the crown of Castile.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Bradwardine

the name of a baron and his daughter, the heroine of "Waverley."

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Chasles, Michel

an eminent French mathematician, and held one of the first in the century; on the faith of certain autographs, which were afterwards proved to be forgeries, he in 1867 astonished the world by ascribing to Pascal the great discoveries of Newton, but had to admit he was deceived (1793-1880).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Bray

a Berkshire village, famous for Simon Aleyn, its vicar from 1540 to 1588, who, to retain his living, never scrupled to change his principles; he lived in the reigns of Charles II., James II., William III., Queen Anne, and George I.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Arnauld, Antoine

the "great Arnauld," a French theologian, doctor of the Sorbonne, an inveterate enemy of the Jesuits, defended Jansenism against the Bull of the Pope, became religious director of the nuns of Port Royal des Champs, associated here with a circle of kindred spirits, among others Pascal; expelled from the Sorbonne and banished the country, died at Brussels (1612-1694).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Lewes

the county town of Sussex, finely situated on a slope of the South Downs, 10 m. NE. of Brighton; was the scene of a victory of Simon de Montfort in 1264 over the forces of Henry III.; has a trade in corn and malt, and tanneries.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Isengrin

the wolf, typifying the feudal baron in the epic tale of Reynard the Fox, as the fox does the Church. See Reynard.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Montespan, Marquise de

mistress of Louis XIV.; a woman noted for her wit and beauty; bore the king eight children; was supplanted by Madame de Maintenon (q. v.); passed her last days in religious retirement (1641-1707).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Paraffin

name given by Baron Reichenbach to a transparent crystalline substance obtained by distillation from wood, bituminous coal, shale, &c., and so called because it resists the action of the strongest acids and alkalies.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Raymond

name of a succession of Counts of Toulouse, in France, seven in number, of which the fourth count, from 1088 to 1105, was a leader in the first crusade, and the sixth, who became Count in 1194, was stripped of his estate by Simon de Montfort.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Albigen`ses

a religious sect, odious, as heretical, to the Church, which sprung up about Albi, in the S. of France, in the 12th century, against which Pope Innocent III. proclaimed a crusade, which was carried on by Simon de Montfort in the 13th century, and by the Inquisition afterwards, to their utter annihilation.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Pollock, Sir Edward

an eminent English judge, born in London, contemporary of Brougham, a Tory in politics, represented Huntingdon, was twice over Attorney-General, became Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1844, and made a baronet on his retirement from the bench (1783-1870).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Louis XIV.

the "Grand Monarque," son of the preceding, was only nine when his father died, and the government was in the hands of his mother, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin, her minister; under the regency the glory of France was maintained in the field, but her internal peace was disturbed by the insubordination of the parlement and the troubles of the Fronde; by a compact on the part of Mazarin with Spain before he died Louis was married to the Infanta Maria Theresa in 1659, and in 1660 he announced his intention to rule the kingdom alone, which he did for 54 years with a decision and energy no one gave him credit for, in fulfilment of his famous protestation L'état, c'est moi, choosing Colbert to control finance, Louvois to reorganise the army, and Vauban to fortify the frontier towns; he sought to be as absolute in his foreign relations as in his internal administration, and hence the long succession of wars which, while they brought glory to France, ended in exhausting her; at home he suffered no one in religious matters to think otherwise than himself; he revoked the Edict of Nantes, sanctioned the dragonnades in the Cévennes, and to extirpate heresy encouraged every form of cruelty; yet when we look at the men who adorned it, the reign of Louis XIV. was one of the most illustrious in letters and the arts in the history of France: Corneille, Racine, and Molière eminent in the drama, La Fontaine and Boileau in poetry, Bossuet in oratory, Bruyère and Rochefoucauld in morals, Pascal in philosophy, Saint-Simon and Retz in history, and Poussin, Lorraine, Lebrun, Perault, &c., in art (1636-1715).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Creighton, Mandell

bishop of London, born at Carlisle; previously bishop of Peterborough; has written on Simon de Montfort, on Wolsey, and on the Tudors and the Reformation, but his great work is the "History of the Papacy from the Great Schism to the Sack of Rome," a work of great value; b. 1843.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

toy language

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">Pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also MFTL.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Hyrcanus, John

the son of Simon Maccabeus, king of Judea, as well as High-Priest of the Jews from 135 to 105 B.C.; achieved the independence of his country from the Syrian yoke, extended the borders of it, and compelled the Edomites to accept the Jewish faith at the point of the sword; in the strife then rampant between the Sadducees (q. v.) and the Pharisees (q. v.) he sided with the former.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Pauli, Reinhold

German historian of England, born in Berlin; studied much in England, and became professor of History at Göttingen; wrote "Life of King Alfred," "History of England from the Accession of Henry II. to the Death of Henry VII.," "Pictures of Old England," and "Simon de Montfort" (1823-1882).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Reeve, Clara

an English novelist, born, the daughter of a rector, at Ipswich; the best known of her novels is "The Champion of Virtue," afterwards called "The Old English Baron," a work of the school of Mrs. Radcliffe and of Walpole (1725-1803).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

William the Silent

Prince of Orange, a cadet of the noble house of Nassau, the first Stadtholder of the Netherlands, a Protestant by birth; he was brought up a Catholic, but being at heart more a patriot than a Catholic, he took up arms in the cause of his country's freedom, and did not rest till he had virtually freed it from the Spanish yoke, which was then the dominant Catholic power; his enemies procured his assassination in the end, and he was murdered by Belthazar Gerard, at Delft; he was brought up at the court of Charles V., where "his circumspect demeanour procured him the surname of Silent, but under the cold exterior he concealed a busy, far-sighted intellect, and a generous, upright, daring heart" (1533-1584).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Staal, Jean

a French lady of humble circumstances, of metaphysical turn; skilled in the philosophies of Descartes and Malebranche; was in the Bastille for two years for political offences; was a charming woman, and captivated the Baron de Staal; left Memoirs and Letters (1693-1750).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

If you want X you know where to find it

There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, once responded to demands for features resembling those of what at the time was a much more popular language by observing “If you want PL/I, you know where to find it.” Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to alter a new design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and baroque) one. The case X = Pascal">Pascal manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in discussions of graphics software (see X).

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Tromp, Cornelius

Dutch admiral, son of succeeding, born at Rotterdam; fought many battles with the English and proved himself a worthy son of a heroic father; was created a baron by Charles II. of England (1675); aided the Danes against Sweden, and subsequently succeeded Ruyter as lieutenant admiral-general of the United Provinces (1629-1691).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Strangford, Percy C. S. Smythe, Viscount

diplomatist; graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1800; entered the diplomatic service, and in the following year succeeded to the title; was ambassador to Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, and Russia; translated the "Rimas" of Camoëns, and was raised to the peerage (1825) as Baron Penshurst (1780-1855).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Ellenborough, Edward Law, Earl of

an English Conservative statesman, son of Baron Ellenborough, Lord Chief-Justice of England; entered Parliament in 1813; held office under the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel; appointed Governor-General of India (1841); recalled in 1844; subsequently First Lord of the Admiralty and Indian Minister under Lord Derby (1790-1871).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Boileau, Nicolas

poet and critic, born in Paris; brought up to the law, but devoted to letters, associating himself with La Fontaine, Racine, and Molière; author of "Satires" and "Epistles," "L'Art Poétique," "Le Lutrin," &c., in which he attached and employed his wit against the bad taste of his time; did much to reform French poetry, as Pascal did to reform the prose, and was for long the law-giver of Parnassus; was an imitator of Pope, but especially of Horace (1636-1711).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Kimberley, Earl of

English Liberal statesman, son of Baron Wodehouse; succeeded to the title 1846; was twice over Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland 1864-66; in 1866 created Earl of Kimberley, he was in succession Lord Privy Seal, Colonial Secretary, Secretary for India, and Foreign Secretary; b. 1826.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Vendôme, Louise Joseph, Duc de

French general, born at Paris, great-grandson of Henry IV.; served in the wars of Louis XIV., and gained several victories; was defeated by Marlborough and Prince Eugene at Oudenarde in 1708, but by his victory at Villaviciosa contributed to the restoration of Philip V. to the Spanish throne in 1711; was a man of gross sensuality, and has been pilloried by Saint Simon for the execration of all mankind (1654-1712).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Pillar-Saints

a class of recluses, called Stylites, who, in early Christian times, retired from the world to the Syrian Desert, and, perched on pillars, used to spend days and nights in fasting and praying, in the frantic belief that by mortification of their bodies they would ensure the salvation of their souls; their founder was Simon, surnamed Stylites; the practice, which was never allowed in the West, continued down to the 12th century.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Montyon Prizes

four prizes in the gift of the French Academy, so named from their founder, Baron de Montyon (1733-1820), and awarded annually for (1) improvements in medicine and surgery; (2) improvements tending to health in some mechanical process; (3) acts of disinterested goodness; (4) literary works conducive to morality; the last two are usually divided among several recipients.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Patrick, St.

the apostle and patron saint of Ireland; his birthplace uncertain; flourished in the 5th century; his mission, which extended over great part of Ireland, and over thirty or forty years of time, was eminently successful, and at the end of it he was buried in Downpatrick, henceforth a spot regarded as a sacred one. Various miracles are ascribed to him, and among the number the extirpation from the soil of all venomous reptiles.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Lynedoch, Thomas Graham, Lord

soldier, born in Perthshire; raised in 1793 the 90th Regiment of Foot, and served with it at Quibéron and Isle Dieu; thereafter distinguished himself in various ways at Minorca 1798, and Malta 1800, in the Peninsular wars, and in Holland; founded the Senior United Service Club in 1817; was created baron and general 1821, and died in London (1748-1843).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Pascal

An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language). The hackish point of view on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, which was turned down by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages, edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The entire essay is available at pascal" target="_top">http://www.lysator.liu./definition/bwk-on-pascal.) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:

Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by C) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Puffendorf, Samuel

Baron von, eminent German jurist, born at Chemnitz, Saxony; wrote several works on jurisprudence, one of which, under the ban of Austria, was burned there by the hangman, but his "De Jure Naturæ et Gentium" is the one on which his fame rests; was successively in the service of Charles XI. of Sweden and the Elector of Brandenburg (1632-1694).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Berze`lius, Johan Jakob

Baron, a celebrated Swedish chemist, one of the creators of modern chemistry; instituted the chemical notation by symbols based on the notion of equivalents; determined the equivalents of a great number of simple bodies, such as cerium and silenium; discovered silenium, and shared with Davy the honour of propounding the electro-chemical theory; he ranks next to Linnæus as a man of science in Sweden (1779-1848).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Lally-Tollendal

or Baron de Tollendal, a French general, born at Romans, in Dauphiné, of Irish descent; saw service in Flanders; accompanied Prince Charles to Scotland in 1745, and was in 1756 appointed Governor-General of the French settlements in India, but being defeated by the English he was accused of having betrayed the French interests, and executed after two years' imprisonment in the Bastille (1702-1766).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Jansenists

a party in the Roman Catholic Church, supporters of Jansen's views, who, in opposition to the Jesuits, maintained the Augustinian principle of the sovereign and irresistible nature of divine grace. The most celebrated members of the party were the Port-Royalists (q. v.) of France, in particular Arnauld and Pascal, and they were opposed not only by the Jesuits, but by both Louis XIV. and the Pope. Driven from France on the death of Louis, they took refuge in Holland, and thither the Pope Clement XI. followed them, first in 1713, hurling a bull against them, and then in 1719 by ex-communicating them and driving them for good from within the pale of the Catholic Church.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Dominic de Guzman, St.

saint of the Catholic Church, born in Old Castile; distinguished for his zeal in the conversion of the heretic; essayed the task by simple preaching of the Word; sanctioned persecution when persuasion was of no avail; countenanced the crusade of Simon de Montfort against the Albigenses for their obstinate unbelief, and thus established a precedent which was all too relentlessly followed by the agents of the Spanish Inquisition, the chiefs of which were of the Dominican order, so that he is ignominiously remembered as the "burner and slayer of heretics" (1170-1221). Festival, Aug. 4.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Système de la Nature

a book, the authorship of which is ascribed to Baron Holbach (q. v.), which appeared in 1770, advocating a philosophical materialism and maintaining that nothing exists but matter, and that mind is either naught or only a finer kind of matter; there is nowhere anything, it insists, except matter and motion; it is the farthest step yet taken in the direction of speculative as opposed to political nihilism.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Jules

a French baron and politician, born at Paris; an associate of Odilon Barrot in the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and subsequently a zealous supporter of M. Thiers; for a time professor of Greek and Roman Philosophy in the College of France; an Oriental as well as Greek scholar; translated the works of Aristotle, his greatest achievement, and the "Iliad" into verse, as well as wrote on the Vedas, Buddhism, and Mahomet; b. 1805.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Grosseteste, Robert

a famous bishop of Lincoln, born at Stradbroke, Suffolk, of peasant parents; a man of rare learning, he became a lecturer in the Franciscan school at Oxford, and rose through various stages to be bishop of Lincoln in 1235; he was an active Parliamentarian, and gave valuable assistance to his friend Simon de Montfort in the struggle with Henry III., and headed the Church reform party against the nepotism of Innocent IV.; according to Stubbs, "he was the most learned, the most acute, and most holy man of his time" (1175-1253).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Erskine, Thomas, Lord

a famous lawyer, youngest son of the Earl of Buchan, born in Edinburgh; spent his early years in the navy, and afterwards joined the army; resigned in 1775 to enter upon the study of law; called to the bar in 1778; a king's counsel in 1783; created a baron and Lord Chancellor in 1806; was engaged in all the famous trials of his time; an unrivalled orator in the law courts; his speeches rank as masterpieces of forensic eloquence (1750-1823).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Heathfield, George Augustus Eliott, Lord

a gallant general, the defender of Gibraltar, son of Sir Gilbert Eliott, born at Stobs, in Roxburghshire; saw service first in the war of the Austrian Succession, fighting at Dettingen and Fontenoy; as a colonel he fought with English troops in alliance with Frederick the Great against Austria; for his heroic defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) against the combined forces of France and Spain he was raised to the peerage as Baron of Gibraltar (1717-1790).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

BASIC

A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective that “It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” This is another case (like Pascal">Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.

[1995: Some languages called “BASIC” aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. —ESR]

BASIC stands for “Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. Earlier versions of this entry claiming this was a later backronym were incorrect.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

EOL

[End Of Line] Syn. for newline, derived perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal. Now rare, but widely recognized and occasionally used for brevity. Used in the example entry under BNF. See also EOF.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Earl of

son of the Earl of Moira; entered the army 1771, and served against the Americans in the War of Independence; created Baron Rawdon in 1783; succeeded to his father's title 1793; entered political life under Fox, and was Governor-General of India 1813-23, in which period fell the Goorkha War, for the successful negotiations subsequent on which he was created Marquis of Hastings; his administration encouraged native education and freedom of the press; from 1824 he was Governor of Malta till his death at Naples (1754-1826).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Eldon, John Scott, Lord

a celebrated English lawyer, born at Newcastle, of humble parentage; educated at Oxford for the Church, but got into difficulties through a runaway marriage; he betook himself to law, rose rapidly in his profession, and, entering Parliament, held important legal offices under Pitt; was made a Baron and Lord Chancellor, 1801, an office which he held for 26 years; retired from public life in 1835, and left a large fortune at his death; was noted for the shrewd equity of his judgments and his delay in delivering them (1751-1838).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Tauchnitz, Karl Cristoph Traugott

a noted German printer and bookseller, born at Grosspardau, near Leipzig; trained as a printer, he started on his own account in Leipzig in 1796, flourished, and became celebrated for his neat and cheap editions of the Roman and Greek classics; introduced stereotyping into Germany (1761-1836). The well-known "British Authors" collection was started in 1841 by Christian Bernard, Baron von Tauchnitz, a nephew of the preceding, who established himself as a printer and publisher in Leipzig in 1837; was ennobled in 1860, and made a Saxon life-peer in 1877; b. 1816.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Sacy, Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de

the greatest of modern Orientalists, born at Paris; by twenty-three was a master of classic, Oriental, and modern European languages; was appointed in 1795 professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental Languages, and in 1806 of Persian in the College de France, besides which he held various other appointments; founded the Asiatic Society in 1822; was created a baron by Napoleon Bonaparte, and entered the Chamber of Peers in 1832; published "Biographies of Persian Poets," a standard Arabic grammar, &c.; his writings gave a stimulus to Oriental research throughout Europe (1758-1838).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Comte, Auguste

a French philosopher, born at Montpellier, the founder of Positivism (q. v.); enough to say here, it consisted of a new arrangement of the sciences into Abstract and Concrete, and a new law of historical evolution in science from a theological through a metaphysical to a positive stage, which last is the ultimate and crowning and alone legitimate method, that is, observation of phenomena and their sequence; Comte was first a disciple of St. Simon, but he quarrelled with him; commenced a "Cours de Philosophie Positive" of his own, in six vols.; but finding it defective on the moral side, he instituted a worship of humanity, and gave himself out as the chief priest of a new religion, a very different thing from Carlyle's hero-worship (1795-1857).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Reynard the Fox

an epic of the Middle Ages, in which animals represent men, "full of broad rustic mirth, inexhaustible in comic devices, a world Saturnalia, where wolves tonsured into monks and nigh starved by short commons, foxes pilgrimaging to Rome for absolution, cocks pleading at the judgment-bar, make strange mummery." The principal characters are Isengrim the wolf and Reynard the fox, the former representing strength incarnated in the baron and the latter representing cunning incarnated in the Church, and the strife for ascendency between the two one in which, though frequently hard pressed, the latter gets the advantage in the end.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Theodore

"King of Corsica," otherwise Baron Theodore de Neuhoff, born in Metz; a soldier of fortune under the French, Swedish, and Spanish flags successively, whose title to fame is his expedition to Corsica, aided by the Turks and the Bey of Tunis, in 1736, to aid the islanders to throw off the Genoese yoke; was crowned King Theodore I., but in a few months was driven out, and after unsuccessful efforts to regain his position came as an impoverished adventurer to London, where creditors imprisoned him, and where sympathisers, including Walpole, subscribed for his release (1686-1756).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Patricians and Plebeians

the two classes into which, from the earliest times, the population of the Roman State was divided, the former of which possessed rights and privileges not conceded to the latter, and stood to them as patrons to clients, like the baron of the Middle Ages to the vassals. This inequality gave rise to repeated and often protracted struggles in the commonalty, during which the latter gradually encroached on the rights of the former till the barrier in civic status, and even in social to some extent, was as good as abolished, and members of the plebeian class were eligible to the highest offices and dignities of the State.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Lyndhurst, John Singleton Copley, Baron

thrice Lord Chancellor of England, born at Boston, Massachusetts, son of an artist; was brought up in London, educated at Cambridge, and called to the bar in 1804; acquiring fame in the treason trials of the second decade, he entered Parliament in 1808, was Solicitor-General 1819, Attorney-General 1819, Master of the Rolls 1826, and Lord Chancellor in three governments 1827-30; Chief Baron of the Exchequer 1830-34; he was Lord Chancellor in Peel's administrations of 1834-35 and 1841-46; he was great as a debater, and a clear-headed lawyer, but not earnest enough for a statesman (1772-1863).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

BOFH

[common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with absolutely no tolerance for lusers. “You say you need more filespace? <massive-global-delete> Seems to me you have plenty left...” Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it) hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own.

Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page. BOFHs and BOFH wannabes hang out on scary devil monastery and wield LARTs.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

languages of choice

C, Perl, Python, Java and LISP — the dominant languages in open-source development. This list has changed over time, but slowly. Java bumped C++ off of it, and Python appears to be recruiting people who would otherwise gravitate to LISP (which used to be much more important than it is now). Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.

The Real Programmers who loved FORTRAN and assembler have pretty much all retired or died since 1990. Assembler is generally no longer considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation, glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs. FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.

Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal">Pascal and Ada, which don't give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely connected with COBOL or other traditional DP languages as a total and unmitigated loss.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

holy wars

[from Usenet, but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.

Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix, Unix vs.: VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal">Pascal, C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi, my personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Godfrey of Bouillon

a renowned Crusader, eldest son of Eustace II., Count of Boulogne; he served with distinction under the Emperor Henry II., being present at the storming of Rome in 1084; his main title to fame rests on the gallantry and devotion he displayed in the first Crusade, of which he was a principal leader; a series of victories led up to the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, and he was proclaimed "Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre," but declined to wear a king's crown in the city where his Saviour had borne a crown of thorns; his defeat of the sultan of Egypt at Ascalon in the same year confirmed him in the possession of Palestine (1061-1100).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

newline

1. [techspeak, primarily Unix] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under Unix as a text line terminator. Though the term newline appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before Unix.

2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) required to terminate a text record or separate lines. See crlf.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Gambier, James, Lord

British admiral, born in the Bahamas; at 22 he was created a post-captain; in 1781 distinguished himself in an engagement against the French at Jersey; and again under Lord Howe in 1794 he rendered material service in repulsing the French off Ushant; in the following year he was made rear-admiral, and in 1799 vice-admiral; for his gallant conduct as commander of the English fleet at the bombardment of Copenhagen he was made a baron; a dispute with Lord Cochrane at the battle of Aix Roads against the French led to his being court-martialled, but he was honourably acquitted; on the accession of William IV. he was made admiral of the fleet (1756-1833).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Clootz, Anacharsis

Baron Jean Baptiste de Clootz, a French Revolutionary, born at Clèves; "world-citizen"; his faith that "a world federation is possible, under all manner of customs, provided they hold men"; his pronomen Anacharsis suggested by his resemblance to an ancient Scythian prince who had like him a cosmopolitan spirit; was one of the founders of the worship of Reason, and styled himself the "orator of the human race"; distinguished himself at the great Federation, celebrated on the Champ de Mars, by entering the hall on the great Federation Day, June 19, 1790, "with the human species at his heels"; was guillotined under protest in the name of the human race (1755-1794).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Wolff, Johann Christian von

German philosopher and mathematician, born at Breslau; was appointed professor at Halle in 1707, but was in 1723 not only removed from his chair, but banished from Prussia by Frederick William on account of his opinions, which, as fatalistic, were deemed socially demoralising, but was recalled by Frederick the Great on his accession, and afterwards promoted to the rank of baron of the empire; he was a disciple of Leibnitz, and the father of the philosophy that prevailed in Germany before the time of Kant; his merits as a philosopher were threefold: he claimed for philosophy the entire field of knowledge, he paid special attention to method in philosophical speculation, and he first taught philosophy to express itself in German, or made German the philosophical language (1679-1754).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Hale, Sir Matthew

Lord Chief-Justice of England, born at Alderley, Gloucestershire: in 1629 he entered Lincoln's Inn after some years of roving and dissipation, and eight years later was called to the bar; as he held aloof from the strife between king and commons, his service as advocate were in requisition by both parties, and in 1653 he was raised to the bench by Cromwell; on the death of the Protector he declined to receive his commission anew from Richard Cromwell, and favoured the return of Charles; after the Restoration he was made Chief Baron of the Exchequer and knighted; in 1671 he was created Lord Chief-Justice; charges of "trimming" have been made against him, but his integrity as a lawyer has never been impugned (1609-1676).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin

French historian, born at Blois; came early under the influence of Saint-Simon, and during 1814-17 lived with him as secretary, assimilating his socialistic ideas and ventilating them in various compositions; Comte became his master next, and history his chief study, an outlet for his views on which he found in the Censeur Européen, and the Courrier Français, to which he contributed his "Letters on French History" (1820); five years later appeared his masterpiece, the "Conquest of England," to be followed by "Letters on History" and "Dix Ans d'Études" (1835), in which same year he was appointed librarian at the Palais Royal; in 1853 appeared his "Tiers État," the last of his works; has been called the "father of romantic history," and was above all a historical artist, giving life and colour to his pictures of bygone ages, but not infrequently at the cost of historic accuracy (1795-1856).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Peter, the Apostle

originally called Simon, was a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee; one of the first called by Christ to become a disciple; the first to recognise, as the foundation-stone of the Church, the divinity in the humanity of His Master, and the first thereafter to recognise and proclaim that divinity as glorified in the cross, to whom in recognising which, especially the former, was committed the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and who accordingly was the first to open the door of it to the Gentile world. He was the principal figure in the history of the early Christian Church, but was soon eclipsed by the overpowering presence and zeal of Paul. Tradition, indeed, has something to tell of him, but from it little of trustworthy can be gathered except that he finished his career by martyrdom in the city of Rome. This Apostle is represented in Christian art as an old man, bald-headed, with a flowing beard, dressed in a white mantle, and holding a scroll in his hand, his attributes being the keys, and a sword in symbol of his martyrdom.

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Wellesley, Richard Cowley, Marquis of

statesman and administrator, born in Dublin, eldest son of the Earl of Mornington, an Irish peer, and eldest brother of the Duke of Wellington, and his senior by nine years; educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in classics; in 1781 succeeded his father in the Irish House of Peers; entered Parliament in 1784; was a supporter of Pitt, and in 1797 appointed Governor-General of India in succession to Cornwallis, and raised to the English peerage as Baron Wellesley; in this capacity he proved himself a great administrator, and by clearing out the French and crushing the power of Tippoo Saib, as well as increasing the revenue of the East India Company, laid the foundation of the British power in India, for which he was raised to the marquisate, and voted a pension of £5000; he afterwards became Foreign Secretary of State and Viceroy of Ireland (1760-1842).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Java

An object-oriented language originally developed at Sun by James Gosling (and known by the name “Oak”) with the intention of being the successor to C++ (the project was however originally sold to Sun as an embedded language for use in set-top boxes). After the great Internet explosion of 1993-1994, Java was hacked into a byte-interpreted language and became the focus of a relentless hype campaign by Sun, which touted it as the new language of choice for distributed applications.

Java is indeed a stronger and cleaner design than C++ and has been embraced by many in the hacker community — but it has been a considerable source of frustration to many others, for reasons ranging from uneven support on different Web browser platforms, performance issues, and some notorious deficiencies in some of the standard toolkits (AWT in particular). Microsoft's determined attempts to corrupt the language (which it rightly sees as a threat to its OS monopoly) have not helped. As of 2003, these issues are still in the process of being resolved.

Despite many attractive features and a good design, it is difficult to find people willing to praise Java who have tried to implement a complex, real-world system with it (but to be fair it is early days yet, and no other language has ever been forced to spend its childhood under the limelight the way Java has). On the other hand, Java has already been a big win in academic circles, where it has taken the place of Pascal">Pascal as the preferred tool for teaching the basics of good programming to the next generation of hackers.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Halifax, Charles Montague, Earl of

a celebrated Whig statesman, born at Horton, Northamptonshire; a clever skit on Dryden's "Hind and Panther," entitled "The Town and Country Mouse," written in collaboration with Prior after he had left Cambridge, brought him some reputation as a wit; in 1688 he entered the Convention Parliament, and attached himself to William's party, when his remarkable financial ability soon brought him to the front; in 1692 he brought forward his scheme for a National Debt, and two years later founded the Bank of England in accordance with the scheme of William Paterson; in the same year he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in 1697 Prime Minister; in conjunction with Sir Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, he carried through a re-coinage, and was the first to introduce Exchequer Bills; in 1699 he was created a Baron, and subsequently was made the victim of a prolonged and embittered but unsuccessful impeachment; with the accession of George I. he came back to power as Prime Minister, and received an earldom (1661-1715).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

camelCase

A variable in a programming language is sait to be camelCased when all words but the first are capitalized. This practice contrasts with the C tradition of either running syllables together or marking syllable breaks with underscores; thus, where a C programmer would write thisverylongname or this_very_long_name, the camelCased version would be thisVeryLongName. This practice is common in certain language communities (formerly Pascal; today Java and Visual Basic) and tends to be associated with object-oriented programming.

Compare BiCapitalization; but where that practice is primarily associated with marketing, camelCasing is not aimed at impressing anybody, and hackers consider it respectable.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Thurlow, Edward, Baron

a noted lawyer and politician of George III.'s reign, born, a clergyman's son, at Bracon-Ash, Norfolk; quitted Cambridge without a degree, and with a reputation for insubordination and braggadocio rather than for scholarship; called to the bar in 1754, he soon made his way, aided by an imposing presence, which led Fox to remark, "No man ever was so wise as Thurlow looked"; raised his reputation by his speeches in the great Douglas case, and through influence of the Douglas family was made a King's counsel; entered Parliament in 1768; became a favourite of the king, and rose through the offices of Solicitor-General and Attorney-General to the Lord Chancellorship in 1778, being raised to the peerage as Baron; lost his position during the Coalition Ministry of Fox and North, but was restored by Pitt, who, however, got rid of him in 1792, after which his appearances in public life were few; not a man of fine character, but possessed a certain rough vigour of intellect which appears to have made considerable impression on his contemporaries (1732-1806).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Datamation

A magazine that many hackers assume all suits read. Used to question an unbelieved quote, as in “Did you read that in Datamation?”. It used to publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like the original paper on COME FROM in 1973, and Ed Post's Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal ten years later, but for a long time after that it was much more exclusively suit-oriented and boring. Following a change of editorship in 1994, Datamation briefly tried for more the technical content and irreverent humor that marked its early days, but this did not last.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Real Programmer

[indirectly, from the book Real Men Don't Eat Quiche] A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal Real Programmer likes to program on the bare metal and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't been tuned into a state of tenseness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation: “If it was hard to write”, says the Real Programmer, “it should be hard to understand.” Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers — because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a Good Thing that there aren't many Real Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A. The term itself was popularized by a letter to the editor in the July 1983 Datamation titled Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in on-line form.

Typing Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal into a web search engine should turn up a copy.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of

celebrated minister of Henry IV. of France, born at the Château of Rosny, near Mantes, whence he was known at first as the Baron de Rosny; at first a ward of Henry IV. of Navarre, he joined the Huguenot ranks along with him, and distinguished himself at Coutras and Ivry, and approved of Henry's policy in changing his colours on his accession to the throne, remaining ever after by his side as most trusted adviser, directing the finances of the country with economy, and encouraging the peasantry in the cultivation of the soil; used to say, "Labourage et pasteurage, voilà les deux mamelles dont La France est alimentée, les vraies mines et trésors de Pérou," "Tillage and cattle-tending are the two paps whence France sucks nourishment; these are the true mines and treasures of Peru;" on the death of the king he retired from court, and occupied his leisure in writing his celebrated "Memoirs," which, while they show the author to be a great statesman, give no very pleasant idea of his character (1560-1611).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich

usually called Jean Paul simply, the greatest of German humourists, born at Wunsiedel, near Baireuth, in Bavaria, the son of a poor German pastor; had a scanty education, but his fine faculties and unwearied diligence supplied every defect; was an insatiable and universal reader; meant for the Church, took to poetry and philosophy, became an author, putting forth the strangest books with the strangest titles; considered for a time a strange, crack-brained mixture of enthusiast and buffoon; was recognised at last as a man of infinite humour, sensibility, force, and penetration; his writings procured him friends and fame, and at length a wife and a settled pension; settled in Baireuth, where he lived thenceforth diligent and celebrated in many departments of literature, and where he died, loved as well as admired by all his countrymen, and more by those who had known him most intimately ... his works are numerous, and the chief are novels, "'Hesperus' and 'Titan' being the longest and the best, the former of which first (in 1795) introduced him into decisive and universal estimation with his countrymen, and the latter of which he himself, as well as the most judicious of his critics, regarded as his masterpiece" (1763-1825).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Hastings, Warren

first Governor-General of India, born at Churchill, Oxfordshire; early left an orphan, he was maintained at Westminster School by his uncle, and at 17 received a clerkship in the East India Company; for 14 years his life was occupied in mercantile and political work, at the close of which time he returned to England; in 1769 he was back in India as a member of the Madras Council; married the divorced wife of Baron Imhoff, and in 1772 was appointed President of the Council in Bengal; under the new arrangement for the governing of the provinces, Hastings was raised to the position of Governor-General in 1773; despite jealousies and misrepresentations both among his colleagues in India and the home authorities, he steadily, and with untiring energy, extended and brought into orderly government the British dominions; in 1785 he voluntarily resigned, and on his return he was impeached before the House of Lords for oppression of the natives, and for conniving at the plunder of the Begums or dowager-princesses of Oudh; the trial brought forth the greatest orators of the day, Burke, Fox, and Sheridan leading the impeachment, which, after dragging on for nearly eight years, resulted in the acquittal of Hastings on all the charges; his fortune having been consumed by the enormous expenses of the trial, he was awarded a handsome pension by the Company, and thereafter lived in honoured retirement (1732-1818).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Staël, Madame de

distinguished French lady, born in Paris, daughter of Necker, and only child; a woman of eminent ability, and an admirer of Rousseau; wrote "Letters" on his character and works; married a man ten years older than herself, the Baron de Staël-Holstein, the Swedish ambassador in Paris, where she lived all through the events of the Revolution in sympathy with the royal family; wrote an appeal in defence of the queen, and quitted the city during the Reign of Terror; on her return in 1795 her salon became the centre of the literary and political activity of the time; the ambition of Napoleon excited her distrust, and forced her into opposition so expressed that in 1801 she was ordered to leave Paris within 24 hours, and not to come within 40 leagues of it; in 1802 she was left a widow, and soon after she went first to Weimar, where she met Goethe and Schiller, and then to Berlin; by-and-by she returned to France, but on the publication of her "Corinne," was ordered out of the country; after this appeared her great epoch-making work on Germany, "L'Allemagne," which was seized by the French censors; after this she quitted for good the soil of France, to which she had returned; settled in Switzerland, at Coppet, where she died (1766-1817).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of

soldier and statesman, born in Devonshire; joined the Guards as ensign, and served in Tangiers in 1667; sent in command of a company to help Louis XIV. in his Dutch wars, his courage and ability won him a colonelcy; he married Sarah Jennings in 1678, and seven years later became Baron Churchill on James II.'s succession; as general he was employed in putting down Monmouth's rebellion; he seceded to William of Orange in 1688, and received from him the earldom of Marlborough; he was in disfavour from 1694 till the outbreak of the Spanish Succession War, in which he gained his great renown; beginning by driving the Spaniards from the Netherlands in 1702, he won a series of important victories—Blenheim 1704, Ramillies 1706, Oudenard 1708, and Malplaquet 1709, contributed to enhance the military glory of England; Queen Anne loaded him with honours; large sums of money, Woodstock estate, Blenheim Palace, and a dukedom were bestowed on him; his wife was the Queen's closest friend, and the duke and duchess virtually governed the country, till in 1711 the Queen threw off their influence, and charges of misappropriation of funds forced him into retirement; he was restored to many of his offices by George I. in 1714, but for the last six years of his life he sank into imbecility; one of England's greatest generals, he was also one of her meanest men (1650-1722).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

Henry III.

king of England from 1216 to 1272, eldest son of King John; succeeded to the throne at the age of nine; during his minority the kingdom was wisely and faithfully served by the Earl of Pembroke and Hubert de Burgh; when he came to years he proved himself a weak ruler, and, according to Stubbs, his administration was "one long series of impolitic and unprincipled acts"; with the elevation of Peter des Roches, a native of Anjou, to the post of chief adviser, French interlopers soon became predominant at the Court, and the recipients of large estates and pensions, an injustice further stimulated by the king's marriage with Eleanor of Provence; justice was prostituted, England humiliated under a feeble foreign policy, and the country finally roused by infamous exactions; Simon de Montfort, the king's own brother-in-law, became the leader of the people and the champion of constitutional rights; by the Provisions of Oxford, forced upon the king by Parliament assembled at Oxford (1258), a wider and more frequent Parliamentary representation was given to the people, and the king's power limited by a permanent council of 15; as an issue of the Barons' War, which resulted in the defeat and capture of the king at Lewes (1264), these provisions were still further strengthened by the Mise of Lewes, and from this time may be dated the birth of representative government in England as it now exists; in 1265 was summoned the first Parliament as at present constituted, of peers temporal and spiritual, and representatives from counties, cities, and boroughs; internal dissensions ceased with the victory of Prince Edward over the barons at Eastham (1265), the popular leader De Montfort perished on the field (1206-1272).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

YAFIYGI

[coined in response to WYSIWYG] Describes the command-oriented ed/vi/nroff/TeX style of word processing or other user interface, the opposite of WYSIWYG. Stands for “You asked for it, you got it”, because what you actually asked for is often not apparent until long after it is too late to do anything about it. Used to denote perversity (“Real Programmers use YAFIYGI tools...and like it!”) or, less often, a necessary tradeoff (“Only a YAFIYGI tool can have full programmable flexibility in its interface.”).

This precise sense of “You asked for it, you got it” seems to have first appeared in Ed Post's classic parody Real Programmers don't use Pascal (see Real Programmers); the acronym is a more recent invention.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Sand, George

the assumed name of Aurore Dupin, notable French novelist, born in Paris; married Baron Dudevant, a man of means, but with no literary sympathies; became the mother of two children, and after nine years effected a separation from him (1831) and went to Paris to push her way in literature, and involved herself in some unhappy liaisons, notably with Alfred de Musset (q. v.) and Chopin; after 1848 she experienced a sharp revulsion from this Bohemian life, and her last twenty-five years were spent in the quiet "Châtelaine of Nohant" (inherited) in never-ceasing literary activity, and in entertaining the many eminent littérateurs of all countries who visited her; her voluminous works reflect the strange shifts of her life; "Indiana," "Lélia," and other novels reveal the tumult and revolt that mark her early years in Paris; "Consuelo," "Spiridion," &c., show her engaged with political, philosophical, and religious speculation; "Elle et Lui" and "Lucrezia Floriani" are the outcome of her relations with Musset and Chopin; the calm of her later years is reflected in "La Petite Fadette," "François le Champi," and other charming studies of rustic life; her "Histoire de ma Vie" and posthumous letters also deserve notice; her work is characterised by a richly flowing style, an exuberant imagination, and is throughout full of true colour and vivid emotion (1804-1876).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

double bucky

Using both the CTRL and META keys. “The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F.”

This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and was later taken up by users of the space-cadet keyboard at MIT. A typical MIT comment was that the Stanford bucky bits (control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you could type only 512 different characters on a Stanford keyboard. An obvious way to address this was simply to add more shifting keys, and this was eventually done; but a keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be implemented as pedals; typing on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called Rubber Duckie, which was published in The Sesame Street Songbook (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN 0-671-21036-X). These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the Stanford keyboard:

[This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer filk —ESR] See also meta bit, cokebottle, and quadruple bucky.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

Nelson, Horatio, Lord

great English admiral, born at Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk; entered the navy as a midshipman in 1770, and after voyages to the West Indies, the Arctic regions, and the East Indies, was promoted to a lieutenancy in 1777; three years later he headed the expedition against San Juan, was invalided home, and in 1781 acted under Lord Hood in American waters; in command of the Boreas on the Leeward Islands station, here he involved himself in trouble through his severe and arbitrary enforcement of the Navigation Act against American traders, and there also he met and married in 1787 the widow of Dr. Nesbit; returning home he lived for five years in retirement, but on the eve of the French Revolutionary war he was again summoned to active service, and in command of the Agamemnon, advanced his reputation by gallant conduct in the Mediterranean operations of Lord Hood, losing his right eye during the storming of Calvi, in Corsica; conspicuous bravery at the engagement with the Spaniards off Cape St. Vincent (1797) brought him promotion to the rank of rear-admiral; in the same year he lost his right arm at Santa Cruz, and in the following year, with an inferior force, annihilated the French fleet in the Bay of Aboukir, for which he was raised to the peerage as Baron Nelson, and created Duke of Bronte by the King of Naples; at this time began his lifelong liaison with Lady Hamilton (q. v.); involving himself in Neapolitan affairs, he went beyond his commission in suppressing the rebel Jacobins, and especially in executing their leader Caracciolo; in 1800 he returned home, his never robust strength considerably impaired; as vice-admiral nominally under Sir Hugh Parker, he in 1801 sailed for the Baltic and inflicted a signal defeat on the Danish fleet off Copenhagen; for this he was made Viscount and commander-in-chief; during the scare of a Napoleonic invasion he kept a vigilant watch in the Channel, and on the resumption of war he on October 21, 1805, crowned his great career by a memorable victory off Trafalgar over the French fleet commanded by Villeneuve, but was himself mortally wounded at the very height of the battle (1758-1805).

— The Nuttall Encyclopedia

TeX

An extremely powerful macro-based text formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, even at many Unix installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case ‘TeX’ is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word ‘TeX’ — such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also CrApTeX.

Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental Art of Computer Programming (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of The Art of Computer Programming is not expected to appear until 2007. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit of toolsmithing on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.

TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but high-quality software. Knuth offers a monetary award to anyone who found and reported bugs dating from before the 1989 code freeze; as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary

indent style

[C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion. There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of control constructs. They have been inherited by C++ and Java, which have C-like syntaxes. The significant variable is the placement of { and } with respect to the statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling statement (if, else, for, while, or do) on the block, if any.

K&R style — Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples in K&R are formatted this way. Also called kernel style because the Unix kernel is written in it, and the ‘One True Brace Style’ (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. In C code, the body is typically indented by eight spaces (or one tab) per level, as shown here. Four spaces are occasionally seen in C, but in C++ and Java four tends to be the rule rather than the exception.

Allman style — Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called BSD style). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol. It is the only style other than K&R in widespread use among Java programmers. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four (or sometimes three) spaces are generally preferred by C++ and Java programmers.

Whitesmiths style — popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces are occasionally seen.

GNU style — Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code, and just about nowhere else. Indents are always four spaces per level, with { and } halfway between the outer and inner indent levels.

Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly universal, but is now much less common in C (the opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an if or while, which is a Bad Thing). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less important than their style's relative economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at once. The Java Language Specification legislates not only the capitalization of identifiers, but where nouns, adjectives, and verbs should be in method, class, interface, and variable names (section 6.8). While the specification stops short of also standardizing on a bracing style, all source code originating from Sun Laboratories uses the K&R style. This has set a precedent for Java programmers, which most follow.

Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of holy wars.

— The New Hacker's Dictionary