Cool Jargon of the Day

Serving Hacker Jargon to the Internet since Jan 1995.

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

Cool Jargon changes every 00:00 GMT. Please come back often.

The Best InterNet Reference Desk

Search by keywords:

Buy the book, The New Hacker's Dictionary,

Paperback, Hardcover.

This page is maintained by
Stephen Jazdzewski (Steve@Jazd.com) and
Charles Jazdzewski (Chuck@Jazd.com) Page Awards

Back to ADB.Net