Related:

• him: n. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory alignment or other addressing property.
  For example, the PDP-11 UNIX linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null pointer)....
• 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...
• magic number n. [Unix/C; common] 1. In source code
  some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commented #define....
• egmentation fault n. [Unix] 1. [techspeak] An error in which a running program attempts to access memory not allocated to it and core dumps with a segmentation violation error.
  This is often caused by improper usage of pointers in the source code, dereferencing a null pointer, or (in C) inadvertently using a non-pointer variable as a pointer....
• 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')....
• 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')....
• dev/null /dev-nuhl/ n. [from the Unix null device, used as a data sink] A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to.
  A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin....
• dev/null: /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] n.
  A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to....
• loose bytes: n. Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or {shim}s many compilers insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment requirements imposed by the machine architecture.
  -- The AI Hackers Dictionary...