18 lines
992 B
Plaintext
18 lines
992 B
Plaintext
munching squares
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n. A display hack dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered
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by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting
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the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T see HAKMEM items 146--148)
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to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour
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the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when
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well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later
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(re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened munching triangles
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(try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), munching w's
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, and munching mazes. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an
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impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display
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terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program
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(or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as munching foos.
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[This is a good example of the use of the word foo as a metasyntactic
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variable.
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