common from FOLDOC

COMmon Algorithmic Language

(COMAL) A language for beginners developed by Benedict Loefstedt and Borge Christensen in 1973 and popular in Europe and Scandinavia. It has a Pascal-like structure added to BASIC. COMAL-80 has been adopted as an introductory language in Denmark.

There is a version for the Amiga and a well-supported version for the PC, running under MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, called UniCOMAL. Recently, it has been developed as a web-scripting language called WebCOMAL.

macharsoft.

There is a COMAL User's Group at 5501 Groveland Terr, Madison WI 53716, USA.

["Beginning COMAL", B. Christensen, Ellis Harwood 1982].

Last updated: 2000-11-14

Common Applications Environment

<operating system>

(CAE) Part of X/Open, based on POSIX and C.

[Details?]

Last updated: 2007-03-01

Common Applications Service Element

Common Application Service Element

Common Architecture for Next Generation Internet Protocol

<networking>

(CATNIP, originally Common Architecture Technology for Next-generation Internet Protocol)

A network architecture designed to provide a compressed form of the existing network layer protocols and to integrate CLNP, IP, and IPX. It provides for any of the transport layer protocols in use, including TP4, CLTP, TCP, UDP, IPX, and SPX, to run over any of the network layer protocol formats: CLNP, IP (version 4), IPX and CATNIP.

CATNIP was originally proposed by Robert L. Ullmann of Lotus Development Corporation on 1993-12-22. It was published as RFC 1707 in October 1994 but it is not an Internet standard of any kind.

Last updated: 1996-03-23

COmmon Business Oriented Language

<language, business>

/koh'bol/ (COBOL) A programming language for simple computations on large amounts of data, designed by the CODASYL Committee in April 1960. COBOL's natural language style is intended to be largely self-documenting. It introduced the record structure.

COBOL was probably the most widely used programming language during the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the major programs that required repair or replacement due to Year 2000 software rot issues were originally written in COBOL, and this was responsible for a short-lived increased demand for COBOL programmers. Even in 2002 though, new COBOL programs are still being written in some organisations and many old COBOL programs are still running in dinosaur shops.

Major revisions in 1968 (ANS X3.23-1968), 1974 (ANS X3.23-1974) and 1985.

Usenet newsgroup: comp.lang.cobol.

["Initial Specifications for a Common Business Oriented Language" DoD, US GPO, Apr 1960].

Last updated: 2002-02-21

common carrier

<communications, company>

(Or "phone company") A private company that offers telecommunications services to the public.

Last updated: 1995-03-20

Common Command Set

<storage, standard>

(CCS) Additional requirements and features for direct-access SCSI devices.

In 1985 when the first SCSI standard was being finalised as an American National Standard, the X3T9.2 Task Group was approached by some manufacturers who wanted changes. Rather than delay the SCSI standard, X3T9.2 formed an ad hoc group to define CCS.

[Spec? Status? "direct-access"?]

Last updated: 1997-03-23

Common Communication Services

<networking, IBM>

(CCS) The standard program interface to networks in IBM's SAA.

Last updated: 2007-05-14

Common Data Format

<library>

(CDF) A library and toolkit based on a self-describing data format for scalar and multidimensional data. CDF aims to be platform- and discipline-independent. A scientific data management package (CDF Library) allows developers to manage data and metadata through APIs. CDF has built-in support for data compression (gZip, RLE, Huffman) and files larger than two gigabytes. There are interfaces for C, FORTRAN, Java, Perl, C#, Visual Basic, IDL and MATLAB.

CDF Home

Last updated: 2015-04-26

Common Desktop Environment

<graphics, operating system>

(CDE) A desktop manager from COSE.

Last updated: 1994-10-31

Common ESP

<language>

(CESP) A Unix-based version of ESP (Extended Self-containing Prolog) from Mitsubishi's AI Language Institute.

Last updated: 2000-07-11

Common Gateway Interface

<web>

(CGI) A standard for running external programs from a web HTTP server. CGI specifies how to pass arguments to the program as part of the HTTP request. It also defines a set of environment variables that are made available to the program. The program generates output, typically HTML, which the web server processes and passes back to the browser. Alternatively, the program can request URL redirection. CGI allows the returned output to depend in any arbitrary way on the request.

The CGI program can, for example, access information in a database and format the results as HTML. The program can access any data that a normal application program can, however the facilities available to CGI programs are usually limited for security reasons.

Although CGI programs can be compiled programs, they are more often written in a (semi) interpreted language such as Perl, or as Unix shell scripts, hence the common name "CGI script".

Here is a trivial CGI script written in Perl. (It requires the "CGI" module available from CPAN).

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 use CGI qw(:standard);

 print header, start_html,
   h1("CGI Test"),
   "Your IP address is: ", remote_host(),
   end_html;

When run it produces an HTTP header and then a simple HTML page containing the IP address or hostname of the machine that generated the initial request. If run from a command prompt it outputs:

  Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

  <!DOCTYPE html
   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">
  <head>
  <title>Untitled Document</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
    content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
  </head>
  <body>
  <h1>CGI Test</h1>Your IP address is: localhost
  </body>
  </html>

The CGI program might be saved as the file "test.pl" in the appropriate directory on a web server, e.g. "/home/httpd/test".

Accessing the appropriate URL, e.g. http://acme.com/test/test.pl, would cause the program to run and a custom page produced and returned.

Early web servers required all CGI programs to be installed in one directory called cgi-bin but it is better to keep them with the HTML files to which they relate unless they are truly global to the site. Similarly, it is neither necessary nor desirable for all CGI programs to have the extension ".cgi".

Each CGI request is handled by a new process. If the process fails to terminate for some reason, or if requests are received faster than the server can respond to them, the server may become swamped with processes. In order to improve performance, Netscape devised NSAPI and Microsoft developed the ISAPI standard which allow CGI-like tasks to run as part of the main server process, thus avoiding the overhead of creating a new process to handle each CGI invocation. Other solutions include mod_perl and FastCGI.

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi.

Last updated: 2007-05-22

Common Hardware Reference Platform

PowerPC Platform

Common Information Model

<standard>

(CIM) An open systems management standard driven by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).

Last updated: 2003-06-07

Common Intermediate Format

<communications, standard>

(CIF) A video format used in videoconferencing systems, which supports both NTSC and PAL signals, with a data rate of 30 frames per second (fps), with each frame containing 288 lines and 352 luminance pixels per line. CIF is part of the ITU H.261 videoconferencing standard.

CIF is also known as Full CIF (FCIF) to distinguish it from Quarter CIF (QCIF), a related video format standard that transfers one fourth as much data as CIF.

Last updated: 2007-05-14

Common Intermediate Language

<language>

(CIL)

[Details?]

["Construction of a Transportable, Milti-Pass Compiler for Extended Pascal", G.J. Hansen et al, SIGPLAN Notices 14(8):117-126, Aug 1979].

Last updated: 1994-10-24

Common Internet File System

<protocol>

(CIFS) An Internet file system protocol, based on Microsoft's SMB. Microsoft has given CIFS to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an Internet Draft. CIFS is intended to complement existing protocols such as HTTP, FTP, and NFS.

CIFS runs on top of TCP/IP and uses the Internet's Domain Name Service (DNS). It is optimised to support the slower speed dial-up connections common on the Internet.

CIFS is more flexible than FTP. FTP operations are carried out on entire files whereas CIFS is aimed at routine data access and incorporates high-performance multi-user read and write operations, locking, and file-sharing semantics.

CIFS is probably closest in functionality to NFS. NFS gives random access to files and directories, but is stateless. With CIFS, once a file is open, state about the current access to that file is stored on both the client and the server. This allows changes on the server side to be notified to the clients that are interested.

Microsoft Overview.

SNIA page.

CIFS: A Common Internet File System, Paul Leach and Dan Perry.

IETF Specification. CIFS version 1.

Last updated: 2003-03-12

Common-ISDN-API

Common ISDN Application Programming Interface

<networking>

(CAPI, Common-ISDN-API) A programming interface standard for an application program to communicate with an ISDN card.

Work on CAPI began in 1989, focussing on the German ISDN protocol, and was finished in 1990 by a CAPI working group consisting of application providers, ISDN equipment manufacturers, large customers, user groups and DBP Telekom, resulting in COMMON-ISDN-API Version 1.1. Following completion of the international protocol specification, almost every telecommunication provider offers BRI and PRI with protocols based on Q.931 / ETS 3009 102. Common-ISDN-API Version 2.0 was developed to support all Q.931 protocols.

http://capi.org/.

[Why not CIAPI?]

Last updated: 1998-09-07

Common Lisp

<language>

A dialect of Lisp defined by a consortium of companies brought together in 1981 by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Companies included Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Bell Labs., Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Lawrence Livermore Labs., Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University, Yale, MIT and USC Berkeley. Common Lisp is lexically scoped by default but can be dynamically scoped.

Common Lisp is a large and complex language, fairly close to a superset of MacLisp. It features lexical binding, data structures using defstruct and setf, closures, multiple values, types using declare and a variety of numerical types. Function calls allow "&optional", keyword and "&rest" arguments. Generic sequence can either be a list or an array. It provides formatted printing using escape characters. Common LISP now includes CLOS, an extended LOOP macro, condition system, pretty printing and logical pathnames.

Implementations include AKCL, CCL, CLiCC, CLISP, CLX, CMU Common Lisp, DCL, KCL, MCL and WCL.

Mailing list: <[email protected]>.

ANSI Common Lisp draft proposal.

["Common LISP: The Language", Guy L. Steele, Digital Press 1984, ISBN 0-932376-41-X].

["Common LISP: The Language, 2nd Edition", Guy L. Steele, Digital Press 1990, ISBN 1-55558-041-6].

Last updated: 1994-09-29

Common LISP in Parallel

<language, parallel>

(CLIP) A version of Common LISP from Allegro for the Sequent Symmetry.

Last updated: 1994-12-12

Common LISP Object System

<language>

(CLOS) An object-oriented extension to Common LISP, based on generic functions, multiple inheritance, declarative method combination and a meta-object protocol. A descendant of CommonLoops and based on Symbolics FLAVORS and Xerox LOOPS, among others.

CommonLoops

<language>

Xerox's object-oriented Lisp which led to CLOS.

Common Management Information Protocol

<protocol>

(CMIP) Part of the OSI body of standards specifying protocol elements that may be used to provide the operation and notification services described in the related standard, CMIS (Common Management Information Services).

Document: ISO/IEC 9596, or equivalent ITU X.711.

Last updated: 1997-12-07

Common Management Information Services

<networking>

(CMIS) Part of the OSI body of network standards.

Network management information services are used by peer processes to exchange information and commands for the purpose of network management. CMIS defines a message set (GET, CANCEL-GET, SET, CREATE, DELETE, EVENT-REPORT and ACTION), and the structure and content of the messages such that they might be used by "open" systems. In concept, it is similar to SNMP, but more powerful (and hence more complex).

ISO/IEC 9595.

Last updated: 2007-08-07

Common Object File Format

<file format>

(COFF) The executable file and object file format used by Unix System V Release 3 and later.

Unix manual page: coff(5).

Last updated: 2007-08-15

Common Object Model

Component Object Model

Common Object Request Broker Architecture

<standard, programming>

(CORBA) An Object Management Group specification which provides a standard messaging interface between distributed objects.

The original CORBA specification (1.1) has been revised through version 2 (CORBA 2) with the latest specification being version 3 (CORBA 3). In its most basic form CORBA consists of the Interface Definition Language (IDL) and the Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII).

The IDL definition is complied into a Stub (client) and Skeleton (server) component that communicate through an Object Request Broker (ORB). When an ORB determines that a request is to a remote object, it may execute the request by communicating with the remote ORB.

The Corba IDL can be mapped to a number of languages including C, C++, Java, COBOL, Smalltalk, Ada, Lisp, Python, and IDLscript. CORBA ORBs are widely available for a number of platforms. The OMG standard for inter-ORB communication is IIOP, this ensures that all CORBA 2 compliant ORBS are able to interoperate.

See also COSS, Component Object Model, RMI.

OMG CORBA specs.

Last updated: 2007-09-04

Common Objects

<language>

An object-oriented Lisp from Hewlett-Packard.

["Inheritance and the Development of Encapsulated Software Components", A. Snyder, Proc 20th Hawaii Conf on Sys Sci, pp. 227-238, 1987].

Last updated: 1995-01-18

Common Open Software Environment

<operating system>

(COSE) An initiative by Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM, Novell, Univel and SCO to improve consistency and interoperability between Unix suppliers.

Last updated: 2023-08-25

Common Program Interface

<programming>

(CPI) The API of SAA.

Last updated: 1997-12-01

Common User Access

<programming>

(CUA) The user interface standard of SAA.

Last updated: 1997-12-01

Commonwealth Hackish

<jargon>

Hacker jargon as spoken outside the US, especially in the British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely to pronounce truncations like "char" and "soc", etc., as spelled (/char/, /sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names (especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include blurgle, "eek", "ook", "frodo", and "bilbo"; "wibble", "wobble", and in emergencies "wubble"; "banana", "tom", "dick", "harry", "wombat", "frog", fish, and so on and on (see foo).

Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes "-o-rama", "frenzy" (as in feeding frenzy), and "city" (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms "parens", "brackets", and "braces" for (), [], and {} are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers "brackets", "square brackets", and "curly brackets". Also, the use of "pling" for bang is common outside the United States.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1995-01-18

Nearby terms:

COMmon Algorithmic Language ♦ Common Applications Environment

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