break
1. vt. To cause to be broken (in
any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph
commands." 2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it
may debugged. The place where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3.
[techspeak] vi. To send an RS-232 break (two character widths of
line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [Unix] vi. To strike
whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to
the current process. Normally, break (sense 3), delete or control-C does this. 5. `break break'
may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of
verb doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which
in turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage,
as badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago.
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break-even point n.
In the process of implementing a new computer language, the
point at which the language is sufficiently effective that one
can implement the language in itself. That is, for a new language
called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has reached break-even when
one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in FOOGOL,
discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use
working versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an
important milestone; see MFTL.
Since this entry was first written, several correspondents
have reported that there actually was a compiler for a tiny
Algol-like language called Foogol floating around on various
VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. A
FOOGOL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum
http://www.ccil.org/retro.
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breath-of-life packet n.
[XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see
boot) code, periodically sent out from
a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any
computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines
depending on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware
code to wait for (or request) such a packet during the reboot
process. See also dickless
workstation.
The notional `kiss-of-death packet', with a function
complementary to that of a breath-of-life packet, is recommended
for dealing with hosts that consume too many network resources.
Though `kiss-of-death packet' is usually used in jest, there is
at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with
limited address-table slots in a gateway machine in which such
packets were routinely used to compete for slots, rather like
Christmas shoppers competing for scarce parking spaces.
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breedle n.
See feep.
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