hello world

interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe. 2. Any
of the minimal programs that emit this message (a representative sample in
various languages can be found at http://www.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/ ).
Traditionally, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new
environment is one that just prints hello, world to standard output (and
indeed it is the first example program in K R ). Environments that generate
an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a
hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to lose (see
X ). 3. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting
information from anyone present.