:religious issues: /n./ Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off {holy wars}, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See {holy wars}; see also {theology}, {bigot}.
This term is a prime example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the crossfire is mumble {Get a life!} and leave — unless, of course, one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being slammed.
:replicator: /n./ Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a living organism, an idea (see {meme}), a program (see {quine}, {worm}, {wabbit}, {fork bomb}, and {virus}), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see {life}, sense 1), or (speculatively) a robot or {nanobot}. It is even claimed by some that {{Unix}} and {C} are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator; see {Unix conspiracy}.
:reply: /n./ See {followup}.
:restriction: /n./ A {bug} or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a {feature}. Often used (esp. by {marketroid} types) to make it sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false).
Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number — on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less {flamage} for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect.
:retcon: /ret'kon/ [short for `retroactive continuity',
from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics] 1. /n./ The common
situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or soap operas) where a
new story `reveals' things about events in previous stories,
usually leaving the `facts' the same (thus preserving
continuity) while completely changing their interpretation. For
example, revealing that a whole season of "Dallas" was a
dream was a retcon. 2. /vt./ To write such a story about a
character
or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so
that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures
were retconned into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was
retconned from a transformed person into a sentient vegetable."
"Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's father in
"The Empire Strikes Back".
[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word `retcon' will probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. —ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics. In lexicography, nothing is ever simple. —ESR]
:RETI: /v./ Syn. {RTI}