meaning of feep
1. feep /feep/ 1. The soft electronic "bell" sound of a display terminal except for a VT-52; a beep in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer beep. 2. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s the original TTYs do not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms: beep, "bleep", or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip "Shoe", uses the word "eep" for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet. The term "breedle" was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicators beep lasting for five seconds. The "feeper" on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a 52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also ding. [Jargon File] feeper /feepr/ The device in a terminal or workstation usually a loudspeaker of some kind that makes the feep sound. feeping creature [feeping creaturism] An unnecessary feature; a bit of chrome that, in the speakers judgment, is the camels nose for a whole horde of new features. [Jargon File] feeping creaturism /feeping kree"ch*r-izm/ A deliberate spoonerism for creeping featurism, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn"t really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises. FEL Function Equation Language. Programs are sets of definitions. Sequences are lists stored in consecutive memory. "FEL Programmers Guide", R. M. Keller, AMPS TR 7, U Utah, March 1982. femto- prefix fence 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished out-of-band characters or other data items, used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit the computer-science literature calls this a "sentinel". The NUL ASCII 0000000 character that terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also though slightly less frequently used this way. See zigamorph. 2. An extra data value inserted in an array or other data structure in order to allow some normal test on the arrays contents also to function as a termination test. For example, a highly optimised routine for finding a value in an array might artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of the array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value without having to check at each pass whether the end of the array had been reached. 3. [among users of optimising compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimisations. Used when explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the optimisers register-colouring info" can be expressed by the shorter "Thats a fence procedure". [Jargon File]
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