Лексичні та синтактико-стилістичні зміни в сучасній англійській мові: вплив комп’ютерних технологій

Glossary of Terms

= A =AI /A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.

AI-complete /A-I k*m-pleet'/ /adj./ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with `NP-complete' (see NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard. Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human).

AI koans /A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./

A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture

ASCII /as'kee/ /n./ [acronym: American Standard Code for Information Interchange] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.

ASCII art /n./

The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly `|', `-', `/', `\', and `+').

ASCIIbetical order /as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ /adj.,n./ Used to indicate that data is sorted in ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order.

= B =

backbone site /n./ A key Usenet and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps.

BAD /B-A-D/ /adj./ [IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] Said of a program that is bogus because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess.

bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ /n./

1.a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner.

E.g.:"This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!"

2.A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly.

Syn.: loser, cretin, chomper.

3. `bite the bag' /vi./ To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.

ITS's `lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.

bagbiting /adj./ Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number."

bang

1./n./ Common spoken name for `!' /interj./ An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!"

barf /barf/ or /ba:f/ /n.,v./ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']

1./interj./ Term of disgust.