wart n.
A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for
localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a
general rule. For example, in some versions of
csh(1), single quotes literalize every character
inside them except !. In ANSI C, the ??
syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign
environment is a wart. See also miswart.
Node:washing machine, Next:washing software,
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washing machine n.
1. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So
called because of the size of the cabinet and the `top-loading'
access to the media packs -- and, of course, they were always set
on `spin cycle'. The washing-machine idiom transcends language
barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also
walking drives. The thick
channel cables connecting these were called `bit hoses' (see
hose, sense 3). 2. [CMU] A machine
used exclusively for washing
software. CMU has clusters of these.