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fool n.
As used by hackers, specifically describes a person
who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect
premises and cannot be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is
not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to describe a person
with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed,
in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too
effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin,
loser, fool file.
The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the
character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as
a floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a
character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one
day a very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a
program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the
correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite
successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See
also DEADBEEF.
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