barf

/barf/ [mainstream slang for "vomit"] 1. Term of disgust.

This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Val-speak "gag

me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch.

2. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust.

"I showed him my latest hack and he barfed" means only that he

complained about it, not that he literally vomited.

3. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with

a suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: "The

division operation barfs if you try to divide by 0." (That

is, the division operation checks for an attempt to divide by

zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to

fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The

text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before

writing out the old one".

See choke, gag.

In Commonwealth Hackish, "barf" is generally replaced by

"puke" or "vom". barf is sometimes also used as a

metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.

(1996-02-26)