barf
/barf/ [mainstream slang for "vomit"] 1. Term of disgust. This is the closest
hackish equivalent of the Val\-speak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See
bletch.
2. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my
latest hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he
literally vomited.
3. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a suitable error
message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to
divide by 0." (That is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide
by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some
unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try
to read in a new file before writing out the old one".
See choke, gag.
In Commonwealth Hackish, "barf" is generally replaced by "puke" or "vom". barf
is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.
(1996-02-26)
Nearby terms:
bar « bar code « bare metal « barf » barfmail
» barfulation » barfulous
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