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= B =
barfmail
barf /barf/ n.,v.
[common; from mainstream slang
meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the
closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a
spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch. 2. vi. To say
"Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed
him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained
about it, not that he literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to
work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error
message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if
you try to divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks
for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it
causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally
obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a
new file before writing out the old one." See choke,
gag. In Commonwealth Hackish, `barf' is generally replaced
by `puke' or `vom'. barf is sometimes also used as a
metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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