May 15, 2003

infinite

adj.

[common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: This program produces infinite garbage. He is an infinite loser. The word most likely to follow infinite, though, is hair. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an excellent example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The term semi-infinite, denoting an immoderately large amount of some resource, is also heard. This compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program. See also semi.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:42 AM

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