:fascist: adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or
annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The
implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from
getting interesting work done. The variant `fascistic' seems to
have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with `touristic'
(see {tourist}). 2. In the design of languages and other
software tools, `the fascist alternative' is the most restrictive
and structured way of capturing a particular function; the
implication is that this may be desirable in order to simplify the
implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare
{bondage-and-discipline language}, although that term is global
rather than local.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but
nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the
foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and
languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of
operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations
they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ
only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly
designed computers....
