barf
[bahrf] 
1955–60; expressive word of uncert. orig.
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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| barf (bärf) tr. & intr.v. barfed, barf·ing, barfs Slang To vomit. [Probably imitative.] barf n. |
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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barf
/barf/ n.,v. [common; from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch.
2. vi. 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. vi. 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.
cough and die
v. Syn. {barf}. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it coughed and died." Compare {die}, {die horribly}, {scream and die}.Cite This Source
barf
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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)
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| BARF best available retrofit facility |
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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