scribbledecobble: D

Dictionary

of just only jargon or jest

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice,
“what that means?” *

— ALICE in Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

abecedarius

an acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the alphabet.
a generic term for an alphabet book dating back to Biblical writings such as the Psalms, which used successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the first letter of each stanza.

e.g.

acrostic

A poem or other text in which certain letters, often the first in each line, spell out a name or message.
A particular kind of word puzzle: its solutions form an anagram of a quotation, and their initials often form its author.

e.g.

Just Only Jargon → Just Only John by Jack Kent

Just Only Jest

“23 ACROSS”? WHERE’D YOU EVER GET A NAME LIKE THAT?

MY PARENTS GOT IT FROM A CROSSWORD PUZZLE.
IT SAID 23 ACROSS WAS A LUMINOUS INSECT.

— PROFESSOR YORGLE & 23 ACROSS
in a King Aroo comic by Jack Kent

aggregation

(fish) the general term for any collection of fish that have gathered together in some locality.
(computer science)
1. a form of object composition in object-oriented programming.
2. in database management: an aggregate function is a function where the values of multiple rows are grouped together as input on certain criteria to form a single value of more significant meaning or measurement such as average, count, maximum, etc.
3. data aggregation is the compiling of information from databases with intent to prepare combined datasets for data processing.

annotation

a critical or explanatory commentary or analysis.
- The Annotated Alice, by Martin Gardner
- The Annotated Wizard of Oz, by Michael Patrick Hearn
- Ulysses Annotated, by Don Gifford
a comment added to a text.
- “People do acquire a little brief authority by equipping themselves with jargon ...” — the beginning of a comment in the margin of Concrete Mathematics (p. v)
- “I have only a marginal interest in this subject.” — a comment in the margin of Concrete Mathematics (p. vii)
the process of writing such comment or commentary
(computing) metadata added to a document or program

comment

(computer programming) a programmer-readable explanation or annotation in the source code of a computer program.

Comments are added with the purpose of making source code easier for humans to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably.

e.g.

<!-- This is a multi-line
HTML comment. -->

/* This is a multi-line
Java, JavaScript or CSS comment. */

// This is a single-line Java or JavaScript comment.

/**
 *  Javadoc comments look something like this.
 *  A Javadoc comment is a special type of multi-line comment.
 */

source code

(computing) any collection of computer instructions, possibly with comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as ordinary text.

The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. The source code is often transformed by an assembler or compiler into binary machine code understood by the computer. The machine code might then be stored for execution at a later time. Alternatively, source code may be interpreted and thus immediately executed.

e.g.

Source code for a Java program:

/* Java is a compiled language. */
public class HelloWorld {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello, World!");
  }
}

Source code for a JavaScript program:

/* JavaScript is an interpreted language. */
window.alert("Hello, World!"); // Easy peasy.

Source code for an HTML page:

<!-- HTML is a declarative language. -->
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

— HUMPTY DUMPTY, ibid.

* See also: What does “this” mean?

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