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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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