1. xyzzy The canonical "magic word" from the ADVENT adventure game, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. If you type "xyzzy" at the appropriate time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on this quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you cant look at someone elses screen if he has protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it anyway. " "Xyzzy!" Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several OSes; in Data Generals AOS/VS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing happens", just as ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In more recent 32 bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds "Twice as much happens". See also plugh. [Jargon File] Y 1. General purpose language syntactically like RATFOR, semantically like C. Lacks structures and pointers. Used as a source language for Jack W. Davidson and Christopher W. Frasers peephole optimiser which inspired GCC RTL and other optimisation ideas. ftp://ftp. cs. princeton. edu/pub/y+po. tar. Z. It is a copy of the original distribution from the University of Arizona during the early 80s, totally unsupported. ["The Y Programming Language", D. R. Hanson, SIGPLAN Notices 162:59-68 Feb 1981]. [Jack W. Davidson and Christopher W. Fraser, "The Design and Application of a Retargetable Peephole Optimiser", TOPLAS, Apr. 1980]. [Jack W. Davidson, "Simplifying Code Through Peephole Optimisation" Technical Report TR81-19, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 1981]. [Jack W. Davidson and Christopher W. Fraser, "Register Allocation and Exhaustive Peephole Optimisation" Software-Practice and Experience, Sep. 1984]. 2. See fixed point combinator. Y2K Year 2000 YA- Yet Another Yaa Yet Another Assembler - Macro assembler for GCOS 8 and Mark III on Bull DPS-8 machines. Available from Bull as part of U Waterloo Tools package maintained by on. ca>. YABA /yab*/ [Cambridge] Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the proposed name would then be "YABA-compatible". Also used in response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See also YA-, TLA. [Jargon File] yacc Yet Another Compiler Compiler YADE Yet Another DSSSL Engine YAFIYGI /yafee-y*-gee/ You asked for it, you got it. The command-oriented ed/vi/nroff/TeX style of word processing or other user interfaces which are not WYSIWYG. What you actually asked for is often not immediately apparent. This precise sense of "You asked for it, you got it" seems to have first appeared in Ed Posts classic parody "Real Programmers dont use Pascal"; the acronym is a more recent
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