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flat: adj. 1. [common] Lacking any complex internal structure. “That
bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a
hierarchical one.” The verb form is flatten.
2. Said of a memory architecture (like that of the
VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear address space
(typically with each possible value of a processor register corresponding
to a unique core address), as opposed to a segmented architecture (like that of the 80x86)
in which addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented
designs are generally considered cretinous). Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually
used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a
Good Thing.
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