- PESSIMAL
- [Latin-based antonym for "optimal"] adj. Maximally bad.
"This is a pessimal situation."
- PESSIMIZING COMPILER
- n. A compiler that produces object code that is
worse than the straightforward or obvious translation.
- PHANTOM
- n. (Stanford) The SAIL equivalent of a DRAGON (q.v.). Typical
phantoms include the accounting program, the news-wire monitor, and
the lpt and xgp spoolers.
- PHASE
- (of people) 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule
with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful
concept among people who often work at night according to no fixed
schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as
six hours/day on a regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've been
getting in about 8 PM lately, but I'm going to work around to the
day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly 12 hours out of
phase is sometimes said to be in "night mode". (The term "day
mode" is also used, but less frequently.)
2.CHANGE PHASE THE HARD
WAY: To stay awake for a very long time in order to get into a
different phase.
3. CHANGE PHASE THE EASY WAY: To stay asleep etc.
- PHASE OF THE MOON
- n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which
something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of
whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on
conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature
depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo
switch set, and on the phase of the moon."
- PLUGH
- [from the Adventure game] v. See XYZZY.
- POM
- n. Phase of the moon (q.v.). Usage: usually used in the phrase
"POM dependent" which means flakey (q.v.).
- POP
- [based on the stack operation that removes the top of a stack, and
the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack]
dialect: POPJ (pop-jay), based on the PDP-10 procedure return
instruction. v. To return from a digression. By verb doubling,
"Popj, popj" means roughly, "Now let's see, where were we?"
- PPN
- (pip'in) [DEC terminology, short for Project-Programmer Number] n.
1.A combination `project' (directory name) and programmer name,
used to identify a specific directory belonging to that user. For
instance, "FOO,BAR" would be the FOO directory for user BAR. Since
the name is restricted to three letters, the programmer name is
usually the person's initials, though sometimes it is a nickname or
other special sequence. (Standard DEC setup is to have two octal
numbers instead of characters; hence the original acronym.)
2.Often used loosely to refer to the programmer name alone. "I want
to send you some mail; what's your ppn?" Usage: not used at MIT,
since ITS does not use ppn's. The equivalent terms would be UNAME
and SNAME, depending on context, but these are not used except in
their technical senses.
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