May 15, 2003

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 fork2; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of Unix libraries such as stdio3 are supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure side-effects of system calls (use of sleep2 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 freeing memory. Compare vaxocentrism; see also New Jersey.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:25 AM

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