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SimpyJargon Lexicon
Search the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
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Meat for the hacker's diet
The Jargon File is great by itself, but it also has plenty of references to invaluable resources, born from the quintessence of the hacker community. For your convenience we have compiled the list of all books that have been mentioned throughout the Jargon File. Here's a random example:
The New Hacker's Dictionary
Eric S. Raymond. MIT Press; 3rd edition. 547 pages. ISBN 0-262-68092-0.
The New Hacker's Dictionary, a common heritage of the hacker culture, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.
Over the years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it. From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the volunteer editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to have a bound paper copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase one of these. They often contain additional material not found in on-line versions.
This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Chapter 3. Revision History.
Random terms
trampoline
trampoline n.
An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes, trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent to a process. These pieces of live data are called trampolines. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.
hexit
hexit /hek´sit/ n.
A hexadecimal digit (0-9, and A-F or a-f). Used by people who claim that there are only ten digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply (see space-cadet keyboard).
bit bashing
bit bashing n.
(alt.: bit diddling or bit twiddling) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of bit, flag, nybble, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; these include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see bitblt), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge (more usually the former). “The command decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs.” See also mode bit.
