command key n.
[Mac users] Syn. feature
key.
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comment out vt.
To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to
prefix every line in the section with a comment marker; this
prevents it from being compiled or interpreted. Often done when
the code is redundant or obsolete, but is being left in the
source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when
the code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in
order to debug some other part of the code. Compare condition out, usually the preferred
technique in languages (such as C) that
make it possible.
Node:Commonwealth Hackish,
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Commonwealth Hackish n.
Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the U.S., esp. in
the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth
speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like `char' and
`soc', etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American
/keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component
names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok
dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/).
Preferred metasyntactic
variables include blurgle,
eek, ook, frodo, and
bilbo; wibble,
wobble, and in emergencies wubble;
flob, banana, tom,
dick, harry, wombat,
frog, fish, womble and so on and on (see foo, sense 4). Alternatives to verb doubling
include suffixes `-o-rama', `frenzy' (as in feeding frenzy), and
`city' (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump
frenzy!").
All the generic differences within the anglophone world
inevitably show themselves in the associated hackish dialects.
The Greek letters beta and zeta are usually pronounced /bee't*/
and /zee't*/; meta may also be pronounced /mee't*/. Various
punctuators (and even letters - Z is called `zed', not `zee') are
named differently: most crucially, for hackish, where Americans
use `parens', `brackets' and `braces' for (), [] and {},
Commonwealth English uses `brackets', `square brackets' and
`curly brackets', though `parentheses' may be used for the first;
the exclamation mark, `!', is called pling rather than bang and
the pound sign, `#', is called hash; furthermore, the term `the
pound sign' is understood to mean the pound currency symbol (of
course).
See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish, go-faster
stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy
metal, leaky heap,
lord high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger,
noddy, psychedelicware, plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun
lounge, terminal
junkie, tick-list
features, weeble, weasel, YABA,
and notes or definitions under Bad
Thing, barf, bogus, bum, chase pointers, cosmic rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy,
gonk, hamster, hardwarily, mess-dos, nybble, proglet,
root, SEX,
tweak, womble, and xyzzy.