- DAY MODE
- See PHASE (of people).
- DEADLOCK
- n. A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to
proceed because each is waiting for another to do something. A
common example is a program communicating to a PTY or STY, which
may find itself waiting for output from the PTY/STY before sending
anything more to it, while the PTY/STY is similarly waiting for
more input from the controlling program before outputting anything.
(This particular flavor of deadlock is called "starvation".
Another common flavor is "constipation", where each process is
trying to send stuff to the other, but all buffers are full because
nobody is reading anything.) See DEADLY EMBRACE.
- DEADLY EMBRACE
- n. Same as DEADLOCK (q.v.), though usually used only
when exactly two processes are involved. DEADLY EMBRACE is the
more popular term in Europe; DEADLOCK in the United States.
- DEMENTED
- adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a program.
The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed,
but the design is bad. For example, a program that generates large
numbers of meaningless error messages implying it is on the point
of imminent collapse.
- DEMON
- (dee'mun) n. A portion of a program which is not invoked
explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to
occur. See DAEMON. The distinction is that demons are usually
processes within a program, while daemons are usually programs
running on an operating system. Demons are particularly common in
AI programs. For example, a knowledge manipulation program might
implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of
knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons
depends on the particular piece of data) and would create
additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective
inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in
turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through
chains of logic. Meanwhile the main program could continue with
whatever its primary task was.
- DIABLO
- (dee-ah'blow) [from the Diablo printer]
1.n. Any letter-quality printing device.
2.v. To produce letter-quality output
from such a device.
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