fossil

n. 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.

