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: /n./ (alt. `trapdoor') 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, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for
something of interest.
:tree-killer: /n./ [Sun] 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet 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" (see also {elvish}, {elder days}).
:treeware: /tree'weir/ /n./ Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare {tree-killer}, see {documentation}.
:trit: /trit/ /n./ [by analogy with `bit'] One base-3
digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one
of three equally likely outcomes (see also {bit}). Trits 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}.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"), defined `trivial theorem' as "one that has already been proved".
:troff:: /T'rof/ or /trof/ /n./ [Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after Multics' RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (*that* name came from the expression "to run off a copy"). A companion program, {nroff}, formats output for terminals and line printers.