meaning of fosi
1. FOSI Formatting Output Specification Instance FOSIL Fredettes Operating System Interface Language fossil 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck. 2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps LCASE bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits. 3. The FOSSIL Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level driver specification for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS software in preference to the "supported" ROM routines, which do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the hook but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in "video fossil". [Jargon File] foundation The axiom of foundation states that the membership relation is well founded, i. e. that any non-empty collection Y of sets has a member y which is disjoint from Y. This rules out sets which contain themselves directly or indirectly. FOundation for Research and Technology - Hellas
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