Related:

• protocol n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting
  hackers don't care about such things. It is used instead to describe any set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity....
• vaxocentrism /vak`soh-sen'trizm/ n. [analogy with `ethnocentrism'] A notional disease said to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions that are valid (esp.
  under Unix) on VAXen but false elsewhere. Among these are...
• ASCII /as'kee/ n. [originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.
  The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer....
• indent style n. [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...
• ping [from the submariners' term for a sonar pulse] 1.
  . Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and alertness of another....
• brute force adj. Describes a primitive programming style
  one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
• fence: n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items)
  used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel')....
• metasyntactic variable n. A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion.
  The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything....
• happily adv. Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some important fact about its environme
  either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because it doesn't care....