Perl terms starting with B

26 terms

  1. backreference A substring captured by a subpattern within unadorned parentheses in a "regex". Backslashed decimal numbers (, , etc.
  2. backtracking The practice of saying, "If I had to do it all over, I'd do it differently," and then actually going back and doing it all over differently.
  3. backward compatibility Means you can still run your old program because we didn't break any of the features or bugs it was relying on.
  4. bareword A word sufficiently ambiguous to be deemed illegal under use strict 'subs'. In the absence of that stricture, a bareword is treated as if quotes were…
  5. base class A generic "object" type; that is, a "class" from which other, more specific classes are derived genetically by "inheritance".
  6. big-endian A common difference between machines is the order in which they store the individual bytes of multi-byte numerical data.
  7. binary Mathematical base 2, or numbers composed of a series of zeros and ones. Since zero's and one's can be easily represented by two voltage levels on an…
  8. binary operator An operator taking two operands. Java has many binary operators, such as the arithmetic operators +, -, *, / and %, and the boolean operators &&, || and…
  9. bind To assign a specific "network address" to a "socket".
  10. Bit A bit ( B inary dig IT ) is the smallest unit of computer data. A bit consists of either 0 or 1. There are eight bits in a byte.
  11. bit shift The movement of bits left or right in a computer word, which has the effect of multiplying or dividing by a power of 2.
  12. bit string A sequence of bits that is actually being thought of as a sequence of bits, for once.
  13. bless In corporate life, to grant official approval to a thing, as in, "The VP of Engineering has blessed our WebCruncher project.
  14. block A repetition/replication of the Early, Mid and Late Seral Treatment plots and a Control plot. See Repetition/replication.
  15. block buffering A method of making input and output efficient by passing one "block" at a time. By default, Perl does block buffering to disk files.
  16. Boolean Boolean logic (named for the British-born Irish mathematician George Boole) is way to express relationships in logic arguments using the following three…
  17. Boolean context A special kind of "scalar context" used in conditionals to decide whether the "scalar value" returned by an expression is "true" or "false".
  18. Breakpoint A breakpoint is the level at which your account balance in a mutual fund company or the size of a new investment in the company's funds qualifies you to…
  19. broadcast To send a "datagram" to multiple destinations simultaneously.
  20. BSD Battlefield Situation Display.
  21. bucket A part of an excavator which digs, lifts, and carries dirt.
  22. buffer A zone of a specified distance around coverage features. Both constant- and variable-width buffers can be generated for a set of coverage features based…
  23. built-in A "function" that is predefined in the language. Even when hidden by "overriding", you can always get at a built-in function by qualifying its name with…
  24. bundle A group of related modules on "CPAN". (Also, sometimes refers to a group of command-line switches grouped into one "switch cluster".)
  25. byte Eight bits. A byte is a collection of bits used by computers to represent a character (i.e., "a", "1", or "&").
  26. bytecode Java source files are translated by a compiler into bytecodes - the instruction set of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Bytecodes are stored in .