splat

1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the

asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive

from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many

early line printers.

2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII

35).

3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a

Mac (same as alt).

4. An obsolete name used by some people for the

Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This

character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other

names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation

for "tensor product".

5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extendedASCII circle-plus character.

See also ASCII.

[Jargon File]

(1995-01-19)