Then delete a line from the file by typing
"dd."
but that would be very bad -- because the reader would be
prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in
vi(1) dot repeats the last command accepted. The net
result would be to delete two lines!
The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.
Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in
Great Britain, though the older style (which became established
for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of
comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there.
"Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and
Editors" call the hacker-like style `new' or `logical' quoting.
This returns British English to the style Latin languages
(including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan) have been using all
along.
Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between
`scare' quotes and `speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style
single quotes for marking and reserve American-style double
quotes for actual reports of speech or text included from
elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as
correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone
to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage
appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk
of mine until I checked with Usenet --ESR]. One further
permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish
tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single
quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on
string and character literal syntax in some programming languages
(reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals
display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single
quote).
One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of Unix hackers in particular is a
tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase
(including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to
remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of
sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such
identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the
`spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an
appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and
confusing them can lead to lossage). A way of escaping this dilemma is
simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of
sentences.
There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard
hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more
important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter
create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded
without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that
other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend
to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to
appear slangy and loose. In fact, to a hacker, the contrast
between `loose' form and `tight' content in jargon is a
substantial part of its humor!
Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and
emphasis conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII
communications links, and these are occasionally carried over
into written documents even when normal means of font changes,
underlining, and the like are available.
One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS
`LOUD', and this becomes such an ingrained synesthetic reflex
that a person who goes to caps-lock while in talk mode may be asked to "stop shouting,
please, you're hurting my ears!".
Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters
to signify emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the
*hell*?" even though this interferes with the common use of the
asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The underscore is also
common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly common with
book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman
wrote _The_Forever_War_ as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's
earlier novel of the future military, _Starship_Troopers_.").
Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/", or "/hell/" are
occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the
first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them
italic, and the second keeps them from falling over). On FidoNet,
you might see #bright# and ^dark^ text, which was actually
interpreted by some reader software. Finally, words may also be
emphasized L I K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under
them on the next line of the text.
There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this*
(which emphasizes the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like*
*this* (which suggests the writer speaking very slowly and
distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally impaired
person). Bracketing a word with the `*' character may also
indicate that the writer wishes readers to consider that an
action is taking place or that a sound is being made. Examples:
*bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*, *stomp*, *mumble*.
One might also see the above sound effects as <bang>,
<hic>, <ring>, <grin>, <kick>,
<stomp>, <mumble>. This use of angle brackets to mark
their contents originally derives from conventions used in BNF, but since about 1993 it has been
reinforced by the HTML markup used on the World Wide Web.
Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term
stands for some random member of a
larger class (this is straight from BNF). Examples like the following are common:
So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day...
There is also an accepted convention for `writing under
erasure'; the text
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman,
he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er,
gentleman...", with irony emphasized. The digraph
^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and
was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the
text was being composed the characters would be echoed and
printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace
keystrokes would be echoed with the string '^H'. Of course, the
final composed text would have no trace of the backspace
characters (or the original erroneous text).
This convention parallels (and may have been influenced by)
the ironic use of `slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to
previous text. This custom faded in email as more mailers got
good editing capabilities, only to tale on new life on IRCs and
other line-based chat systems.
I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding".
This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools
ed and sed, but is widely recognized by
non-Unix hackers as well.
In a formula, * signifies multiplication but two
asterisks in a row are a shorthand for exponentiation (this
derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write 2 ** 8 = 256.
Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently
uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead
2^8 = 256. This goes all the way back to Algol-60,
which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became the
caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC,
which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and
dc(1) Unix tools, which have probably done most to
reinforce the convention on Usenet. (TeX math mode also uses ^
for exponention.) The notation is mildly confusing to C
programmers, because ^ means bitwise exclusive-or in
C. Despite this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990
snapshot of Usenet. It is used consistently in this lexicon.
In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or
improper fractions (`3.5' or `7/2') rather than `typewriter
style' mixed fractions (`3-1/2'). The major motive here is
probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced font,
together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be
read as `three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely
preferred for fractions with a terminating decimal
representation; there may be some cultural influence here from
the high status of scientific notation.
Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or
very small numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from
FORTRAN). This is a form of `scientific notation' using `e' to
replace `*10^'; for example, one year is about 3e7 seconds
long.
The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of
`approximately'; that is, ~50 means `about
fifty'.
On Usenet and in the MUD world,
common C boolean, logical, and relational operators such as
|, &, ||,
&&, !, ==,
!=, >, <,
>=, and =< are often combined
with English. The Pascal not-equals, <>, is
also recognized, and occasionally one sees /= for
not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of
prefix `!' as a loose synonym for `not-' or `no-' is particularly
common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue' or `clueless'.
A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming
languages to express ideas in a natural-language text. For
example, one might see the following:
In <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:
>I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
>Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
>right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
>kind of neat, but its performance left something
>to be desired.
Yeah, I tried one out too.
#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
#endif /* FLAME */
I guess they figured the price premium for true
frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget.
#include <disclaimer.h>
--
== Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)
In the above, the #ifdef/#endif pair
is a conditional compilation syntax from C; here, it implies that
the text between (which is a flame)
should be evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on)
the switch FLAME. The #include at the end is C for
"include standard disclaimer here"; the `standard disclaimer' is
understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and
not to be construed as the official position of my employer."
The top section in the example, with > at the left margin,
is an example of an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.
More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World
Wide Web, pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar
purposes:
<flame>
Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!
</flame>
You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:
<flame intensity="100%">
You seem well-suited for a career in government.
</flame>
Another recent (late 1990s) construction now common on USENET
seems to be borrowed from Perl. It consists of using a dollar
sign before an uppercased form of a word or acronym to suggest
any random member of the class
indicated by the word. Thus: `$PHB' means "any random member of
the class `Pointy-Haired Boss'".
Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in
mainstream usage. In particular, it is good hackish style to
write a digit sequence where you intend the reader to understand
the text string that names that number in English. So, hackers
prefer to write `1970s' rather than `nineteen-seventies' or
`1970's' (the latter looks like a possessive).
It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less
reluctance to use multiply-nested parentheses than is normal in
English. Part of this is almost certainly due to influence from
LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses (like this (see?)) in
its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a more
basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and
pushing systems to their limits is in operation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line
communication have shown that electronic links have a
de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of the body-language
cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend to
forget everything about other parties except what is presented
over that ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good
one is that it encourages honesty and tends to break down
hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one is that it may
encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in
response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of
conscious formal _politesse_ in their writing that has
passed out of fashion in other spoken and written media (for
example, the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon).
Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in
person communicate with considerable fluency over the net,
perhaps precisely because they can forget on an unconscious level
that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel stressed
and anxious as they would face to face.
Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters
for poor spelling or grammar, the network places a premium on
literacy and clarity of expression. It may well be that future
historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great
tradition of personal letters as art.
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