:pain in the net: /n./ A {flamer}.
:Pangloss parity: /n./ [from Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist in Voltaire's "Candide">[ In corporate DP shops, a common condition of severe but equally shared {lossage} resulting from the theory that as long as everyone in the organization has the exactly the *same* model of obsolete computer, everything will be fine.
:paper-net: /n./ Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. Usenet {sig block}s sometimes include a "Paper-Net:" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants of this are "Papernet" and "P-Net". Note that the standard {netiquette} guidelines discourage this practice as a waste of bandwidth, since netters are quite unlikely to casually use postal addresses. Compare {voice-net}, {snail-mail}, {P-mail}.
:param: /p*-ram'/ /n./ Shorthand for `parameter'. See also {parm}; compare {arg}, {var}.
:PARC: /n./ See {XEROX PARC}.
:parent message: /n./ What a {followup} follows up.
:parity errors: /pl.n./ Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors." Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error in RAM hardware. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and serial communication lines; this is more serious because not always correctable.
:Parkinson's Law of Data: /prov./ "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving systems tends to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars also tends to double about once every 12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue indefinitely.
:parm: /parm/ /n./ Further-compressed form of {param}. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym {arg} is favored among hackers. Compare {arg}, {var}.
:parse: [from linguistic terminology] /vt./ 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A `parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some controversy over whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean `deboned'.