:gabriel: /gay'bree-*l/ /n./ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a Gabriel', `Gabriel mode'.
:gag: /vi./ Equivalent to {choke}, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also {barf}.
:gang bang: /n./ The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in {orthogonal}ity. When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes infinitesimal. See also {firefighting}, {Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}.
:garbage collect: /vi./ (also `garbage collection', n.) See
{GC}.
:garply: /gar'plee/ /n./ [Stanford] Another metasyntactic
variable (see {foo}); once popular among SAIL hackers.
:gas: [as in `gas chamber'] 1. /interj./ A term of disgust
and hatred, implying that gas should be dispensed in generous
quantities, thereby exterminating the source of irritation. "Some
loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2. /interj./
A
suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of
mercy. "The system's getting {wedged} every few minutes.
Gas!" 3. /vt./ To {flush} (sense 1). "You should gas that old
crufty software." 4. [IBM] /n./ Dead space in nonsequentially
organized files that was occupied by data that has since been
deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called
`degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term
in vacuum technology). 5. [IBM] /n./ Empty space on a disk that
has
been clandestinely allocated against future need.
:gaseous: /adj./ Deserving of being {gas}sed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).
:gawble: /gaw'bl/ /n./ See {chawmp}.
:GC: /G-C/ [from LISP terminology; `Garbage Collect'] 1. /vt./ To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent to {GFR}. 2. /vt./ To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. /n./ An instantiation of the garbage collector process.
`Garbage collection' is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e., without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.