Online Computer Terms Dictionary - G

General Activities Simulation Program

<simulation, library> (GASP) A set of discrete system simulation subroutines for Fortran.

(2003-09-27)

General Aerodynamic Simulation Program

<simulation> (GASP)

http://www.aerosft.com/Gasp/References/main.php3.

[Summary?]

(2003-09-27)

General Electric

<company> (GE) A US company that manufactured computers from 1956 until 1970, when it sold its computer division to Honeywell and left the computer business. Notable GE computers were the GE-265, which supported the Dartmouth Time-sharing System (DTSS), and the GE-645 used for Multics development.

See also GCOS.

Not to be confused with the General Electric Company (GEC) in the UK (where FOLDOC's first seeds were sown).

(2002-02-27)

General Electric Comprehensive Operating System

GCOS

General Magic

A software company based in Mountain View, California. Products released in 1994 after four years in development include: Telescript - a communications-oriented programming language; Magic Cap - an OOPS designed for PDAs; and a new, third generation GUI. Motorola's Envoy, due for release in the third quarter of 1994, will use Magic Cap as its OS.

What PostScript did for cross-platform, device-independent documents, Telescript aims to do for cross-platform, network-independent messaging. Telescript protects programmers from many of the complexities of network protocols.

Competitors for Magic Cap include Microsoft's Windows for Pens/Winpad, PenPoint, Apple Computer's Newton Intelligence and GEOS by GeoWorks.

Home.

(1995-02-23)

General Packet Radio Service

<communications> (GPRS) A GSM data transmission technique that does not set up a continuous channel from a portable terminal for the transmission and reception of data, but transmits and receives data in packets. It makes very efficient use of available radio spectrum, and users pay only for the volume of data sent and received.

See also: packet radio.

(1999-09-12)

General Protection Failure

(GPF, or General Protection Fault) An addressing error, caught by the processor's memory protection hardware, that cannot be attributed to any expected condition such as a page fault.

(1995-03-28)

General Protection Fault

General Protection Failure

General Public Licence

<spelling> It's spelled "General Public License".

(In the UK, "licence" is a noun and "license" is a verb (like "advice"/"advise") but in the US both are spelled "license").

(1995-05-12)

General Public License

<legal> (GPL, note US spelling) The licence applied to most software from the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project and other authors who choose to use it.

The licences for most software are designed to prevent users from sharing or changing it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee the freedom to share and change free software - to make sure the software is free for all its users. The GPL is designed to make sure that anyone can distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if they wish); that they receive source code or can get it if they want; that they can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that they know they can do these things. The GPL forbids anyone to deny others these rights or to ask them to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for those who distribute copies of the software or modify it.

See also General Public Virus.

(1994-10-27)

General Public Virus

<software, legal> A pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or application programs incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same terms as GNU code. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft "infects" software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code.

Copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code" so GPL is only passed on if actual GNU source is transmitted. This used to be the case with the Bison parser skeleton until its licence was fixed.

http://org.gnu.de/manual/bison/html_chapter/bison_2.html#SEC2.

[Jargon File]

(1999-07-14)

General Purpose Graphic Language

["A General Purpose Graphic Language", H.E. Kulsrud, CACM 11(4) (Apr 1968)].

General Purpose Interface Bus

IEEE 488

General Purpose Language

(GPL) An ALGOL 60 variant with user-definable types and operators.

[Sammet 1969, p. 195].

["The GPL Language", J.V. Garwick et al, TER-05, CDC, Palo Alto 1969].

General Purpose Macro-generator

<language> (GPM) An early text-processing language similar to TRAC, implemented on the Atlas 2 by Christopher Strachey.

["A General Purpose Macrogenerator", C. Strachey, Computer J 8(3):225-241, Oct 1965].

(2006-07-21)

General Recursion Theorem

<mathematics> Cantor's theorem, originally stated for ordinals, which extends inductive proof to recursive construction. The proof is by pasting together "attempts" (partial solutions).

[Better explanation?]

(1995-06-15)

generate

To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an algorithm or program.

The opposite of parse.

[Jargon File]

(1995-06-15)

generation

An attempt to classify the degree of sophistication of programming languages.

See First generation language -- Fifth generation language.

(1995-06-15)