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24-letter words containing f, a, l, t, e

  • pure functional language — purely functional language
  • quadrature of the circle — the insoluble problem of constructing, by the methods of Euclidean geometry, a square equal in area to a given circle.
  • quick-assembly furniture — furniture such as shelves and cupboards which you buy as a number of separate pieces and assemble yourself
  • referential transparency — (programming)   An expression E is referentially transparent if any subexpression and its value (the result of evaluating it) can be interchanged without changing the value of E. This is not the case if the value of an expression depends on global state which can change value. The most common example of changing global state is assignment to a global variable. For example, if y is a global variable in: f(x) { return x+y; } g(z) { a = f(1); y = y + z; return a + f(1); } function g has the "side-effect" that it alters the value of y. Since f's result depends on y, the two calls to f(1) will return different results even though the argument is the same. Thus f is not referentially transparent. Changing the order of evaluation of the statements in g will change its result. We could make f above referentially transparent by passing in y as an argument: f(x, y) = x+y Similarly, g would need to take y as an argument and return its new value as part of the result: g(z, y) { a = f(1, y); y' = y+z; return (a + f(1, y'), y'); } Referentially transparent programs are more amenable to formal methods and easier to reason about because the meaning of an expression depends only on the meaning of its subexpressions and not on the order of evaluation or side-effects of other expressions. We can stretch the concept of referential transparency to include input and output if we consider the whole program to be a function from its input to its output. The program as a whole is referentially transparent because it will always produce the same output when given the same input. This is stretching the concept because the program's input may include what the user types, the content of certain files or even the time of day. If we do not consider global state like the contents of files as input, then writing to a file and reading what was written behaves just like assignment to a global variable. However, if we must consider the state of the universe as an input rather than global state then any deterministic system would be referentially transparent! See also extensional equality, observational equivalence.
  • republic of south africa — Republic of, a country in S Africa; member of the Commonwealth of Nations until 1961. 472,000 sq. mi. (1,222,480 sq. km). Capitals: Pretoria and Cape Town.
  • self-extensible language — ["SEL - A Self-Extensible Programming Language", G. Molnar, Computer J 14(3):238-242 (Aug 1971)].
  • serial interface adaptor — (SIA) The Ethernet driver chip used on a Filtabyte Ethernet card.
  • single transferable vote — of or relating to a system of voting in which voters list the candidates in order of preference. Any candidate achieving a predetermined proportion of the votes in a constituency is elected. Votes exceeding this amount and those cast for the bottom candidate are redistributed according to the stated preferences. Redistribution continues until all the seats are filled
  • split image range finder — a range finder in which opposing halves of a split field move relative to each other and coincide when the object centered in the field is in focus.
  • stratified random sample — a random sample of a population in which the population is first divided into distinct subpopulations, or strata, and random samples are then taken separately from each stratum.
  • tagged image file format — (file format, graphics)   (TIFF) A file format used for still-image bitmaps, stored in tagged fields. Application programs can use the tags to accept or ignore fields, depending on their capabilities. While TIFF was designed to be extensible, it lacked a core of useful functionality, so that most useful functions (e.g. lossless 24-bit colour) requires nonstandard, often redundant, extensions. The incompatibility of extensions has led some to expand "TIFF" as "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats". Compare GIF, PNG, JPEG.
  • telephony user interface — (communications)   (TUI) Either a software interface to telephony (e.g. a phone-capable PC) or a DTMF-based interface to software (e.g. voicemail).
  • telescope user interface — (hardware, interface)   (TUI) A remote control interface for a telescope.
  • the department of health — a department of the government of the United Kingdom concerned with governmental policy relating to health in England but not elsewhere in the United Kingdom
  • the last of the mohicans — a historical novel (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper.
  • the official secrets act — an act of Parliament that covers the protection of information relating to state security
  • the realm of possibility — If you say that something is not beyond the realms of possibility, you mean that it is possible.
  • the villain of the piece — If you say that someone is the villain of the piece, you are saying in a slightly humorous way that they are seen by some people as the cause of all the trouble in a particular situation.
  • think (all) the world of — to admire or love greatly
  • to fight a losing battle — If you are fighting a losing battle, you are trying to achieve something but are not going to be successful.
  • to make up for lost time — If someone is making up for lost time, they are doing something actively and with enthusiasm because they have not had the opportunity to do it before or when they were younger.
  • to speak well of someone — If you speak well of someone or speak highly of someone, you say good things about them. If you speak ill of someone, you criticize them.
  • to strike a blow for sth — If you strike a blow for a particular cause or principle, you do something that supports it or makes it more likely to succeed.
  • tools of one's/the trade — The tools of your trade or the tools of the trade are the skills, instruments, and other equipment that you need in order to do your job properly.
  • trip the light fantastic — a journey or voyage: to win a trip to Paris.
  • unfederated malay states — a former group of native states in the Malay Peninsula that became British protectorates between 1885 and 1909. All except Brunei joined the Malayan Union (later Federation of Malaya) in 1946. Brunei joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 but later became an independent nation
  • uniform resource locater — Uniform Resource Locator
  • uniform resource locator — (web)   (URL, previously "Universal") A standard way of specifying the location of an object, typically a web page, on the Internet. Other types of object are described below. URLs are the form of address used on the World-Wide Web. They are used in HTML documents to specify the target of a hypertext link which is often another HTML document (possibly stored on another computer). Here are some example URLs: http://w3.org/default.html http://acme.co.uk:8080/images/map.gif http://foldoc.org/?Uniform+Resource+Locator http://w3.org/default.html#Introduction ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip ftp://spy:[email protected]/pub/topsecret/weapon.tgz mailto:[email protected] news:alt.hypertext telnet://dra.com The part before the first colon specifies the access scheme or protocol. Commonly implemented schemes include: ftp, http (web), gopher or WAIS. The "file" scheme should only be used to refer to a file on the same host. Other less commonly used schemes include news, telnet or mailto (e-mail). The part after the colon is interpreted according to the access scheme. In general, two slashes after the colon introduce a hostname (host:port is also valid, or for FTP user:[email protected] or [email protected]). The port number is usually omitted and defaults to the standard port for the scheme, e.g. port 80 for HTTP. For an HTTP or FTP URL the next part is a pathname which is usually related to the pathname of a file on the server. The file can contain any type of data but only certain types are interpreted directly by most browsers. These include HTML and images in gif or jpeg format. The file's type is given by a MIME type in the HTTP headers returned by the server, e.g. "text/html", "image/gif", and is usually also indicated by its filename extension. A file whose type is not recognised directly by the browser may be passed to an external "viewer" application, e.g. a sound player. The last (optional) part of the URL may be a query string preceded by "?" or a "fragment identifier" preceded by "#". The later indicates a particular position within the specified document. Only alphanumerics, reserved characters (:/?#"<>%+) used for their reserved purposes and "$", "-", "_", ".", "&", "+" are safe and may be transmitted unencoded. Other characters are encoded as a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. Space may also be encoded as "+". Standard SGML "&;" character entity encodings (e.g. "é") are also accepted when URLs are embedded in HTML. The terminating semicolon may be omitted if & is followed by a non-letter character.
  • ventricular fibrillation — Pathology. a cardiac arrhythmia characterized by rapid, chaotic electrical impulses to the ventricles, incomplete ventricular contractions, and resultant loss of pulse and blood pressure.
  • virtual software factory — (programming, tool)   (VSF) A product from Systematica which allows users to develop CASE tools appropriate to any software engineering methodology.
  • volume table of contents — (storage)   (VTOC) /V-tock/ A special file on a disk, which contains a list of all the ordinary files on the disk and their addresses. Also called a directory. The term is used mostly with large mainframe disk drives. Storage administrators will often refer to the VTOC to obtain information on the number of files stored on a disk.
  • water of crystallization — water of hydration, formerly thought necessary to crystallization: now usually regarded as affecting crystallization only as it forms new molecular combinations.
  • you can't be too careful — You can say 'You can't be too careful' as a way of advising someone to be careful, even when this seems unnecessary.
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