recursive acronym
<convention> A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose
acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE
("EINE Is Not Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there
is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and GNU
stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands
to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support".
See also mung.
[Jargon File]
(1995-04-28)
Nearby terms:
recursion « recursion theory « recursive « recursive
acronym » recursive definition » recursive descent
parser » Recursive Functional Algorithmic Language
