unixism

n. A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected
multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that
exists on virtual-memory Unix systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous
use of fork (2) ; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known
features of Unix libraries such as stdio (3) are supported elsewhere;
reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of sleep (2) with a 0
argument to clue the scheduler that you're willing to give up your
time-slice, for example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is
zeroed; and the assumption that fragmentation problems won't arise from
never free () ing memory. Compare vaxocentrism ; see also New Jersey.
