28-letter words containing a, m, i, l
- supplemental security income — income provided by the U.S. government to needy aged, blind, and disabled persons. Abbreviation: SSI.
- systemic lupus erythematosus — an autoimmune inflammatory disease of the connective tissues, occurring mainly among middle-aged women, chiefly characterized by skin eruptions, joint pain, recurrent pleurisy, and kidney disease. Abbreviation: SLE.
- systems administrators guild — (body, job) (SAGE) A special technical group of the USENIX Association.
- text reckoning and compiling — (language) (TRAC) An interactive macro generator language for string manipulation by Calvin N. Mooers and Peter Deutsch of Sun Microsystems. TAC derived ideas from Macro SAP. There are versions for PDP-1, PDP-8, PDP-10 and PDP-11. See also MINT, SAM76. E-mail: Preston Briggs <[email protected]>.
- the medical research council — a government body that uses public funds to finance research in medicine
- the world owes them a living — If you say that someone thinks that the world owes them a living, you are criticizing them because they think it is their right to have a comfortable life without having to make any effort at all.
- theophylline ethylenediamine — aminophylline.
- tissue plasminogen activator — an anticlotting enzyme, naturally occurring in small amounts in the blood.
- to come to a screeching halt — (of a motor vehicle) to stop suddenly, causing the brakes or tyres to produce a high-pitched sound
- to make a clean breast of it — If you make a clean breast of something, you tell someone the truth about yourself or about something wrong that you have done.
- to make someone's blood boil — If you say that something makes your blood boil, you are emphasizing that it makes you very angry.
- to play into someone's hands — If you play into someone's hands, you do something which they want you to do and which places you in their power.
- to take something lying down — If someone takes an insult or attack lying down, they accept it without protesting.
- tree transformation language — (functional programming) (TXL) A hybrid functional language and rule-based language developed by J.R. Cordy <[email protected]> et al of Queen's University, Canada in 1988. TXL is suitable for performing source to source analysis and transformation and for rapid prototyping of new languages and language processors. It uses structural transformation based on term rewriting. TXL has been particularly successful in software engineering tasks such as design recovery, refactoring, and reengineering. Most recently it has been applied to artificial intelligence tasks such as recognition of hand-written mathematics, and to transformation of structured documents in XML. TXL takes as input an arbitrary context-free grammar in extended BNF-like notation, and a set of show-by-example transformation rules to be applied to inputs parsed using the grammar. TXL supports the notion of agile parsing, the ability to tailor the grammar to each particular task using "grammar overrides".
- very small aperture terminal — (communications) (VSAT) A kind of ground station used to contact a communications satellite such as INMARSAT.
- waveform generation language — (testing) (WGL) A data description language for test program description.
- zeroth law of thermodynamics — the principle that any two systems in thermal equilibrium with a third system are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Compare law of thermodynamics (def 2).