flat

adj. 1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. That bitty box has
only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one. The verb form is flatten. 2.
Said of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one
big linear address space (typically with each possible value of a processor
register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a segmented
architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a
base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered
cretinous ). Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is
usually used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a Good Thing.

