The Jargon File

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]

Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C

zap

  1. n. Spiciness.  2. vt. To make food spicy.  3. vt. To
   make someone `suffer' by making his food spicy.  (Most hackers
   love spicy food.  Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it
   makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.)  See
   zapped.  4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used
   when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching
   tool.  Also implies surgical precision.  "Zap the debug level to 6
   and run it again."  In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are
   applied to programs or to the OS with a program called
   `superzap', whose file name is `IMASPZAP' (possibly contrived
   from I M A SuPerZAP).  5. vt. To erase or reset.  6. To fry a
   chip with static electricity.  "Uh oh -- I think that lightning
   strike may have zapped the disk controller."

zapped

 adj.  Spicy.  This term is used to distinguish
   between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is
   *spicy*-hot.  For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon
   Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by
   contrast, vanilla wonton soup is hot but not zapped.  See also
   oriental_food, laser_chicken.  See zap, senses 1 and
   2.

zen

 vt.  To figure out something by meditation or by a
   sudden flash of enlightenment.  Originally applied to bugs, but
   occasionally applied to problems of life in general.  "How'd you
   figure out the buffer allocation problem?"  "Oh, I zenned it."
   Contrast grok, which connotes a time-extended version of
   zenning a system.  Compare hack_mode.  See also guru.

zero

 vt.  1. To set to 0.  Usually said of small pieces of
   data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction `zero
   out').  2. To erase; to discard all data from.  Said of disks and
   directories, where `zeroing' need not involve actually writing
   zeroes throughout the area being zeroed.  One may speak of
   something being `logically zeroed' rather than being
   `physically zeroed'.  See scribble.

zero-content

 adj.  Syn. content-free.

zeroth

 /zee'rohth/ adj.  First.  Among software designers,
   comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays.  Hardware
   people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is
   natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the
   binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as
   `counters' count in this way.

   Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first
   chapter of a publication `chapter 0', especially if it is of an
   introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First
   Edition of K&R).  In recent years this trait has also been
   observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent
   tradition of numbering from 0).  Zero-based numbering tends to
   reduce fencepost_errors, though it cannot eliminate them
   entirely.

zigamorph

 /zig'*-morf/ n.  1. Hex FF (11111111) when used
   as a delimiter or fence character.  Usage: primarily at IBM
   shops.  2. [proposed] n. The Unicode non-character +UFFFF
   (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any
   character, and so is usable as end-of-string.  (Unicode (a subset
   of ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of
   the world's writing systems, including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic,
   Chinese, hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Easter Island
   `rongo-rongo', and even elvish.)

zip

 [primarily MS-DOS] vt.  To create a compressed archive
   from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible
   archiver.  Its use is spreading now that portable implementations
   of the algorithm have been written.  Commonly used as follows:
   "I'll zip it up and send it to you."  See tar_and_feather.

zipperhead

 n.  [IBM] A person with a closed mind.

zombie

 n.  [UNIX] A process that has died but has not yet
   relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process
   hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet).  These can be seen in
   `ps(1)' listings occasionally.  Compare orphan.

zorch

 /zorch/  1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat
   sink.  2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c
   [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed -- ESR].  3. [MIT]
   v. To propel something very quickly.  "The new comm software is
   very fast; it really zorches files through the network."  4. [MIT]
   n.  Influence.  Brownie points.  Good karma.  The intangible and
   fuzzy currency in which favors are measured.  "I'd rather not ask
   him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with
   him for the week."  5. [MIT] n. Energy, drive, or ability.  "I
   think I'll punt that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours
   and I've run out of zorch."  6. [MIT] v. To flunk an exam or
   course.

Zork

 /zork/ n.  The second of the great early experiments
   in computer fantasy gaming; see ADVENT.  Originally written
   on MIT-DM during 1977-1979, later distributed with BSD UNIX (as a
   patched, sourceless RT-11 FORTRAN binary; see retrocomputing)
   and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom.  The
   FORTRAN source was later rewritten for portability and released to
   Usenet under the name "Dungeon".  Both FORTRAN "Dungeon" and
   translated C versions are available at many FTP sites.

zorkmid

 /zork'mid/ n.  The canonical unit of currency in
   hacker-written games.  This originated in Zork but has spread
   to nethack and is referred to in several other games.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [^a-zA-Z]

Appendix A --- Appendix B --- Appendix C