Of software, used to emphasize that a
program is unaware of some important fact about its environment,
either because it has been fooled into believing a lie, or because
it doesn't care. The sense of `happy' here is not that of
elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program
continues to run, happily unaware that its output is going to
/dev/null." Also used to suggest that a program or device would
really rather be doing something destructive, and is being given an
opportunity to do so. "If you enter an O here instead of a zero,
the program will happily erase all your data." Neverheless, use of
this term implies a basically benign attitude towards the program:
It didn't mean any harm, it was just eager to do its job. We'd like
to be angry at it but we shouldn't, we should try to understand it
instead. The adjective "cheerfully" is often used in exactly the
same way.
