/dwim/ [acronym, "Do What I Mean" (not what I
say)] 1. Able to gue
ss,
sometime
s even correctly, the re
sult intended when bogu
s input wa
s provided. 2. The BBNLI
sP/INTERLI
sP function that attempted to accompli
sh thi
s feat by correcting many of the more common error
s.
see
hairy. 3. Occa
sionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, e
specially when one
sen
se
s one might be tripping over legali
sm
s (
see
legalese). Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix hi
s typo
s and
spelling error
s,
so it wa
s somewhat idio
syncratic to hi
s style, and would often make ha
sh of anyone el
se'
s typo
s if they were
styli
stically different.
some victim
s of DWIM thu
s claimed that the acronym
stood for "Damn Warren'
s Infernal Machine!' . In one notoriou
s incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter u
sed at
Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed "delete *$" to free up
some di
sk
space. (The editor there named backup file
s by appending "$" to the original file name,
so he wa
s trying to delete any backup file
s left over from old editing
se
ssion
s.) It happened that there weren' t any editor backup file
s,
so DWIM helpfully reported "*$ not found, a
ssuming you meant ' delete *' ". It then
started to delete all the file
s on the di
sk! The hacker managed to
stop it with a
Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or
so file
s were lo
st. The di
sgruntled victim later
said he had been
sorely tempted to go to Warren'
s office, tie Warren down in hi
s chair in front of hi
s work
station, and then type "delete *$" twice. DWIM i
s often
sugge
sted in je
st a
s a de
sired feature for a complex program it i
s al
so occa
sionally de
scribed a
s the
single in
struction the ideal computer would have. Back when proof
s of program correctne
ss were in vogue, there were al
so joke
s about "DWIMC" (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often
seen a
s a verb, i
s DTRT (Do The Right Thing)
see
Right Thing. [
Jargon File]
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