Recursive acronym
convention
A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE (“EINE Is Not Emacs”) and ZWEI (“ZWEI Was EINE Initially”). More recently, there is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix!” – and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to “Cygnus, Your GNU Support”.
See also mung.
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-28)
Read Also:
- Recursive-definition
noun, Logic. 1. a definition consisting of a set of rules such that by repeated application of the rules the meaning of the definiendum is uniquely determined in terms of ideas that are already familiar.
- Recursive descent parser
grammar A “top-down” parser built from a set of mutually-recursive procedures or a non-recursive equivalent where each such procedure usually implements one of the productions of the grammar. Thus the structure of the resulting program closely mirrors that of the grammar it recognises. [“Recursive Programming Techniques”, W.H. Burge, 1975, ISBN 0-201-14450-6]. (1995-04-28)
- Recursive function
noun 1. (logic, maths) a function defined in terms of the repeated application of a number of simpler functions to their own values, by specifying a base clause and a recursion formula
- Recursively
adjective 1. pertaining to or using a rule or procedure that can be applied repeatedly. 2. Mathematics, Computers. pertaining to or using the mathematical process of recursion: a recursive function; a recursive procedure. adjective, adverb
- Recursive macro actuated generator
tool (RMAG) Robert A. Magnuson, NIH ca 1970. A stand-alone macroprocessor for IBM 360/370 under VS or OS. Many built-in features and a library of several hundred macros. Several large systems were written in RMAG to generate source code for languages such as IBM JCL, IBM assembly language, COBOL. There was also a system (SLANG: […]