8-letter words containing a, c, i, n, e, t
- intercal — (language, humour) /in't*r-kal/ (Said by the authors to stand for "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym"). Possibly the most elaborate and long-lived joke in the history of programming languages. It was designed on 1972-05-26 by Don Woods and Jim Lyons at Princeton University. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. The INTERCAL Reference Manual, describing features of horrifying uniqueness, became an underground classic. An excerpt will make the style of the language clear: It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is: DO :1 <- #0$#256 any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct. INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. Eric S. Raymond <[email protected]> wrote C-INTERCAL in 1990 as a break from editing "The New Hacker's Dictionary", adding to it the first implementation of COME FROM under its own name. The compiler has since been maintained and extended by an international community of technomasochists and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity. The version 0.9 distribution includes the compiler, extensive documentation and a program library. C-INTERCAL is actually an INTERCAL-to-C source translator which then calls the local C compiler to generate a binary. The code is thus quite portable.
- invocate — invoke.
- iterance — iteration.
- jacinthe — a yellowish orange
- laitance — a milky deposit on the surface of new cement or concrete, usually caused by too much water.
- linctape — (storage) A formatted, block-oriented, high-reliability, random access tape system used on the Laboratory Instrument Computer. The tape was 3/4" wide. The funny DECtape is actually a variant of the original LINCtape. According to Wesley Clark, DEC tried to "improve" the LINCtape system, which mechanically, was wonderfully simple and elegant. The DEC version had pressure fingers and tape guides to force alignment as well as huge DC servo motors and complex control circuitry. These literally shredded the tape to bits if not carefully adjusted, and required frequent cleaning to remove all the shedded tape oxide. That was amazing, because the tape had a micro-thin plastic layer OVER the oxide to protect it. What happened was that all the forced alignment stuff caused shredding at the edge. An independent company, Computer Operations[?], built LINCtape drives for use in nuclear submarines. This was based on the tape system's high reliability. Correspondent Brian Converse has a picture of himself holding a LINCtape punched full of 1/4" holes. It still worked!
- magnetic — of or relating to a magnet or magnetism.
- medicant — a healing substance; medicine; remedy.
- mixtecan — a branch of a family of American Indian languages spoken in central Mexico
- navicert — A form of passport permitting a neutral ship to traverse a blockade in wartime.
- nearctic — belonging or pertaining to a geographical division comprising temperate Greenland and arctic North America, sometimes including high mountainous regions of the northern Temperate Zone.
- neumatic — any of various symbols representing from one to four notes, used in the musical notation of the Middle Ages but now employed solely in the notation of Gregorian chant in the liturgical books of the Roman Catholic Church.
- noetical — Alternative form of noetic.
- oceanite — A variety of picrite that is chiefly composed of olivine phenocrysts.
- patience — a female given name.
- pectinal — of or resembling a comb
- pedantic — ostentatious in one's learning.
- pentadic — of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a pentad
- pittance — a small amount or share.
- planetic — of, relating to, or caused by a planet
- reacting — to act or perform again.
- reaction — a reverse movement or tendency; an action in a reverse direction or manner.
- scanties — women's underwear
- semantic — of, relating to, or arising from the different meanings of words or other symbols: semantic change; semantic confusion.
- sonicate — a thing which has been subjected to sound waves
- tacitean — of, relating to, or characteristic of Publius Cornelius Tacitus.
- taconite — a low-grade iron ore, containing about 27 percent iron and 51 percent silica, found as a hard rock formation in the Lake Superior region.
- teach-in — a prolonged period of lectures, speeches, etc., conducted without interruption by members of the faculty and invited guests at a college or university as a technique of social protest.
- teaching — Informal. teacher.
- tenacity — the quality of being tenacious, or of holding fast; persistence: the amazing tenacity of rumors.
- teucrian — of or relating to the ancient Trojans.
- tunicate — Zoology. any sessile marine chordate of the subphylum Tunicata (Urochordata), having a saclike body enclosed in a thick membrane or tunic and two openings or siphons for the ingress and egress of water.
- unactive — inactive, listless, or idle
- uncinate — hooked; bent at the end like a hook.
- vesicant — producing a blister or blisters, as a medicinal substance; vesicating.
- xerantic — pertaining to xeransis
- zincates — Plural form of zincate.