great from FOLDOC

greater than

">" ASCII character 62.

Common names: ITU-T: greater than; ket ("<" = bra); right angle; right angle bracket; right broket. Rare: into, toward; write to; blow ("<" = suck); gozinta; out; zap (all from Unix I/O redirection); INTERCAL: right angle.

greatest common divisor

<mathematics>

(GCD) A function that returns the largest positive integer that both arguments are integer multiples of.

See also Euclid's Algorithm. Compare: lowest common multiple.

Last updated: 1999-11-02

greatest lower bound

<theory>

(glb, meet, infimum) The greatest lower bound of two elements, a and b is an element c such that c <= a and c <= b and if there is any other lower bound c' then c' <= c.

The greatest lower bound of a set S is the greatest element b such that for all s in S, b <= s. The glb of mutually comparable elements is their minimum but in the presence of incomparable elements, if the glb exists, it will be some other element less than all of them.

glb is the dual to least upper bound.

(In LaTeX "<=" is written as \sqsubseteq, the glb of two elements a and b is written as a \sqcap b and the glb of set S as \bigsqcap S).

Last updated: 1995-02-03

Great Renaming

<history>

The flag day in 1986 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used especially in discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources."

FAQ.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 2000-07-14

Great Runes

Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these.

See also runes, smash case, fold case.

Back in the days when it was the sole supplier of long-distance hardcopy transmision devices, the Teletype Corporation was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER or all lower. The Question Of The Day was therefore, which one to choose. A study was conducted on readability under various conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won; it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus much easier to read both under ideal conditions and when the letters are mangled or partly obscured. The results were filtered up through management. The chairman of Teletype killed the proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion:

  "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly."

In this way (or so, at least, hacker folklore has it) superstition triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s. Thus, that one bad call stuck us with Great Runes for thirty years.

Last updated: 1994-12-02

Great Worm

Internet Worm

Nearby terms:

GRE ♦ greater than ♦ greatest common divisor ♦ greatest lower bound

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