Jargon File

Jargon File

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let the smoke out v. To fry hardware (see fried).
See magic smoke for a discussion of the underlying mythology....
letterbomb 1. n. A piece of email containing live data intended to do nefarious things to the recipient's machine or terminal.
It used to be possible, for example, to send letterbombs tha...
lexer /lek'sr/ n. Common hacker shorthand for `lexical analyzer', the input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it into word-like pieces).
Some C lexers g...
lexiphage /lek'si-fayj`/ n. A notorious word chomper on ITS.
See bagbiter....
life n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970)
he game's popularity had to wai...
Life is hard prov. [XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretatio
(1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it....
light pipe n. Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.
lightweight adj. Opposite of heavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as `lightweight process'.
like kicking dead whales down the beach adj. Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process.
First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of ...
like nailing jelly to a tree adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp.

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