:toy program: n. 1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a
trivial program (compare {noddy}). 2. One for which the effort
of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle.
See also {noddy}.
:trampoline: n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some {HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. These pieces of {live data} are called `trampolines'. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also {snap}.
:trap: 1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program. 2. vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions."
This term is associated with assembler programming (`interrupt' or `exception' is more common among {HLL} programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see {system}, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).
:trap door: alt. `trapdoor' n. 1. Syn. {back door} —- a {Bad Thing}. 2. [techspeak] A `trap-door function' is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are {Good Thing}s with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems.
:trash: vt. To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including {mung}, {mangle}, and {scribble}.
:trawl: v. To sift through large volumes of data (e.g. USENET postings or FTP archives) looking for something of interest.
:tree-killer: [Sun] n. 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper' includes the production of {spiffy} but {content-free} documents. Thus, most {suit}s are tree-killers. The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet `tree-killer' applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's `Lord of the Rings' trilogy (see also {elvish}, {elder days}).
:trit: /trit/ [by analogy with `bit'] n. One base-3 digit; the
amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three
equally likely outcomes (see also {bit}). These arise, for
example, in the context of a {flag} that should actually be able
to assume *three* values —- such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are
sometimes jokingly called `3-state bits'. A trit may be
semi-seriously referred to as `a bit and a half', although it is
linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is,
log2(3)
bits).
:trivial: adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly {cretinous} would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish `trivial' usually evaluates to `I've seen it before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See {nontrivial}, {uninteresting}.