The New Hacker's Dictionary

2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to choke, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called 'ad-hackery', 'ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), 'ad-crockery'. See also ELIZA effect.

Ada // n.

A Pascal-descended language that was at one time made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description wss "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, elephantine bulk.

address harvester // n.

A robot that searches web pages and/or filters netnews traffic looking for valid email addresses. Some address harvesters are benign, used only for compiling address directories. Most, unfortunately, are run by miscreants compiling address lists to spam. Address harvesters can be foiled by a teergrube.

adger /aj'r/ vt.

[UCLA mutant of nadger, poss. also from the middle name of an infamous tenured graduate student] To make a bonehead move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare dumbass attack.

admin /ad-min'/ n.

Short for 'administrator'; very commonly used in speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common constructions on this include 'sysadmin' and 'site admin' (emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or 'newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, system mangler.

ADVENT /ad'vent/ n.

The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom.