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= C =
compact
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, 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.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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