Glossary¶

acronym¶

A term formed from the initial letters of several words and pronounced as a word, eg. laser.

association list¶

A list of the form:

((key1 value1)
 (key2 value2)
 ...)

CLOS¶

Common Lisp Object System – see CLOS.

concomitant¶

My dictionary says:

naturally accompanying or associated

and with our computer science hats on we can suggest that they are required to be defined together.

Of interest, the dictionary’s etymology says:

early 17th century: from late Latin concomitant- ‘accompanying’, from concomitari, from con- ‘together with’ + comitari, from Latin comes ‘companion’

So, “me and my mate” rather than, as I thought, co-committed/co-defined.

grok¶

to understand intuitively

A neologism from Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

grok

homoiconicity¶

Homoiconicity is defined as:

A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program’s internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself.

Although whether Lisps are actually homoiconic and quite what homoiconic actually means is often a cause for debate.

initialism¶

initialism

A term formed from the initial letters of several words and pronounced letter by letter, eg. BBC.

Glossary¶

DIPS

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