16 lines
882 B
Plaintext
16 lines
882 B
Plaintext
line noise
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n. 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a
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communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may
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be induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other
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circuits, electrical storms, cosmic rays , or (notionally) birds crapping on
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the phone wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like
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the results of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a
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readable text or program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks
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like line noise in senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The
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canonical example is TECO ; it is often claimed that TECO's input syntax is
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indistinguishable from line noise. Other non- WYSIWYG editors, such as
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Multics qed and Unix ed , in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify
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easily, as do deliberately obfuscated languages such as INTERCAL.
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