Dictionary De - En
De - Es
De - Pt| English Dictionary: black hole | by the DICT Development Group |
| 4 results for black hole | |
| From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]: | |
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| From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: | |
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Black hole \Black" hole`\ A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or guardroom; -- now commonly with allusion to the cell (the Black Hole) in a fort at Calcutta, into which 146 English prisoners were thrust by the nabob Suraja Dowla on the night of June 20, 17656, and in which 123 of the prisoners died before morning from lack of air. A discipline of unlimited autocracy, upheld by rods, and ferules, and the black hole. --H. Spencer. | |
| From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]: | |
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black hole n.,vt. [common] What data (a piece of email or netnews, or a stream of TCP/IP packets) has fallen into if it disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a {bounce message}). "I think there's a black hole at foovax!" conveys suspicion that site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see {drop on the floor}). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Readily verbed as `blackhole': "That router is blackholing IDP packets." Compare {bit bucket} aand see {RBL}. | |
| From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
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black hole 1. An expression which depends on its own value or a technique to detect such expressions. In graph reduction, when the reduction of an expression is begun, the root of the expression can be overwritten with a black hole. If the expression depends on its own value, e.g. x = x + 1 then it will try to evaluate the black hole which will usually print an error message and abort the program. A secondary effect is that, once the root of the expression has been black-holed, parts of the expression which are no longer required may be freed for garbage collection. Without black holes the usual result of attempting to evaluate an expression which depends on itself would be a stack overflow. If the expression is evaluated successfully then the black hole will be updated with the value. Expressions such as ones = 1 : ones are not black holes because the list constructor, : is lazy so the reference to ones is not evaluated when evaluating ones to WHNF. 2. Where an {electronic mail} message or {news} aritcle has gone if it disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites without returning a {bounce message}. Compare {bit bucket}. [{Jargon File}] | |
