STA from FOLDOC

STAB

<language>

A descendent of BCPL.

Last updated: 1996-08-25

STAB-11

["The Translation and Interpretation of STAB-11", A.J.T. Colin et al, Soft Prac & Exp 5(2):123-138, Apr 1975].

Last updated: 1996-08-25

stable

<programming>

1. A quality of a program that is relatively unlikely to fall over (to terminate unexpectedly).

2. stable sort.

Last updated: 2018-09-05

stable sort

<programming, data>

A sort algorithm that preserves the order of records with equal keys. Stability is only relevant when sorting records (or objects) that contain data other than the sort key.

Last updated: 2018-09-05

STAC

<language>

1. Storage Allocation and Coding Program.

<company>

2. The company responsible for Stacker and stac compression.

http://stac.com/.

Last updated: 1998-06-08

stac compression

<communications>

A data compression technique from STAC, used with modems. Stac compression is capable of compressing data by a factor of about four.

[Details?]

Last updated: 1998-06-08

stack

<programming>

(See below for synonyms) A data structure for storing items which are to be accessed in last-in first-out order.

The operations on a stack are to create a new stack, to "push" a new item onto the top of a stack and to "pop" the top item off. Error conditions are raised by attempts to pop an empty stack or to push an item onto a stack which has no room for further items (because of its implementation).

Most processors include support for stacks in their instruction set architectures. Perhaps the most common use of stacks is to store subroutine arguments and return addresses. This is usually supported at the machine code level either directly by "jump to subroutine" and "return from subroutine" instructions or by auto-increment and auto-decrement addressing modes, or both. These allow a contiguous area of memory to be set aside for use as a stack and use either a special-purpose register or a general purpose register, chosen by the user, as a stack pointer.

The use of a stack allows subroutines to be recursive since each call can have its own calling context, represented by a stack frame or activation record. There are many other uses. The programming language Forth uses a data stack in place of variables when possible.

Although a stack may be considered an object by users, implementations of the object and its access details differ. For example, a stack may be either ascending (top of stack is at highest address) or descending. It may also be "full" (the stack pointer points at the top of stack) or "empty" (the stack pointer points just past the top of stack, where the next element would be pushed). The full/empty terminology is used in the Acorn Risc Machine and possibly elsewhere.

In a list-based or functional language, a stack might be implemented as a linked list where a new stack is an empty list, push adds a new element to the head of the list and pop splits the list into its head (the popped element) and tail (the stack in its modified form).

At MIT, pdl used to be a more common synonym for stack, and this may still be true. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming", second edition, vol. 1, p. 236) says:

  Many people who realised the importance of stacks and queues
  independently have given other names to these structures:
  stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages,
  cellars, dumps, nesting stores, piles, last-in first-out
  ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1995-04-10

Stack Environment Control Dump machine

(SECD machine) The first abstract machine for reducing lambda-calculus expressions, invented by P. J. Landin. The machine has four registers holding pointers to linked lists operated as push-down stacks which hold the information required for the evaluation of an expression. The registers point to (1) Stack which holds the arguments of partially evaluated expressions and results of completely evaluated ones, (2) Environment where the current expression being evaluated is stored, (3) Control which holds the machine instructions that manipulate the contents of the four registers that represent the expression being evaluated, (4) Dump on which the state of the machine is temporarily saved during the evaluation of expressions. See also Lispkit.

stack frame

activation record

stacking order

<graphics>

The relationship between windows that (partially) obscure each other. A window manager will include commands to alter the stacking order by bringing a chosen window to the front (top) or back (bottom) of the stack.

Last updated: 1995-03-21

stack loader

<hardware, storage>

(Or "autoloader") A magnetic tape drive that can automatically fetch tapes from a stack and load them.

Compare jukebox.

[Sequential or random access?]

Last updated: 1996-12-12

stack overflow

<programming>

An error condition which results from attempting to push more items onto a stack than space has been allocated for. Often, this will simply overwrite the adjacent memory locations causing hard-to-trace bugs.

Stack overflow can result, for example, from an insufficient number of stack frames to handle hardware interrupts.

Last updated: 1995-03-21

stack pointer

<architecture, programming>

(SP) A register or variable pointing to the top of a stack.

Last updated: 2004-11-08

stack puke

Some processor architectures are said to "puke their guts onto the stack" to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a while.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1994-11-01

stack traceback

<programming>

(The results of) determining the sequence of nested procedure calls a program has made up to a certain point in its execution. A traceback may also show values of procedure arguments and local variables stored on the stack.

Last updated: 1995-03-21

STAGE2

A macro language.

["The Mobile Programming System: STAGE2", W.M. Waite, CACM 13:415 (1970)].

Last updated: 1994-10-27

Staggered Pin Grid Array

<hardware>

(SPGA) A style of integrated circuit socket or pin-out with a staggered grid of pins around the edge of the socket, positioned as several squares, one inside the other.

SPGA is commonly used on motherboards for processors, e.g. Socket 5, Socket 7 and Socket 8.

staircase

jaggies

staircasing

jaggies

stale pointer bug

<programming>

(Or "aliasing bug") A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, especially via malloc or equivalent.

If several pointers address (are "aliases for") a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc arena. This bug can be avoided by never creating aliases for allocated memory, or by use of a higher-level language, such as Lisp, which employs a garbage collector.

The term "aliasing bug" is nowadays associated with C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the ALGOL 60 and Fortran communities in the 1960s.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1995-05-09

Stalker

<company>

Previous name of the company Ministra.

Last updated: 2023-04-01

stalker_portal

<networking, security>

A back door in television set-top boxes made by Ministra (previously known as Stalker) that lets the service provider fetch data from the device, e.g. to find out what the customer has been watching. crackers exploit this back door to probe for vulnerabilities in the software, e.g. to download protected video content via the box.

A typical probing HTTP request looks like:

 GET /stalker_portal/c/version.js HTTP/1.1

SANS Article.

Last updated: 2023-04-01

stalker_portal/c/version.js

 {stalker_portal}

Stallman, Richard M.

Richard Stallman

stand-alone

<jargon>

Capable of operating without other programs, libraries, computers, hardware, networks, etc. Exactly what is absent is presumed to be obvious from context.

"We only run Windows on stand-alone PCs because it's too dangerous to run it on networked ones."

Last updated: 1998-02-11

standard

<standard>

Standards are necessary for interworking, portability, and reusability. They may be de facto standards for various communities, or officially recognised national or international standards.

Andrew Tanenbaum, in his Computer Networks book, once said, "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from", a reference to the fact that competing standards become a source of confusion, division, obsolescence, and duplication of effort instead of an enhancement to the usefulness of products.

Some bodies concerned in one way or another with computing standards are IAB (RFC and STD), ISO, ANSI, DoD, ECMA, IEEE, IETF, OSF, W3C.

Last updated: 1999-07-06

Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments

<standard>

(SCPI) A standard complementing IEEE 488, developed by Hewlett-Packard and promoted by the SCPI Consortium.

Last updated: 1994-11-01

Standard d'Echange et de Transfert

<standard>

(SET) A French standard for exchange of CAD data.

Last updated: 1998-03-07

standard deviation

<statistics>

(SD) A measure of the range of values in a set of numbers. Standard deviation is a statistic used as a measure of the dispersion or variation in a distribution, equal to the square root of the arithmetic mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean.

The standard deviation of a random variable or list of numbers (the lowercase greek sigma) is the square of the variance. The standard deviation of the list x1, x2, x3...xn is given by the formula:

 sigma = sqrt(((x1-(avg(x)))^2 + (x1-(avg(x)))^2 +
              ...  + (xn(avg(x)))^2)/n)

The formula is used when all of the values in the population are known. If the values x1...xn are a random sample chosen from the population, then the sample Standard Deviation is calculated with same formula, except that (n-1) is used as the denominator.

[dictionary.com].

["Barrons Dictionary of Mathematical Terms, second edition"].

Last updated: 2003-05-06

standard for robot exclusion

<web>

A proposal to try to prevent the havoc wreaked by many of the early web robots when they retrieved documents too rapidly or retrieved documents that had side effects (such as voting). The proposed standard for robot exclusion offers a solution to these problems in the form of a file called "robots.txt" placed in the document root of the website.

W3C standard.

Last updated: 2006-10-17

Standard for the exchange of product model data

(STEP) A draft ISO standard for the exchange of CAD data.

Standard Generalised Markup Language

<spelling>

ISO spell it "Standard Generalized Markup Language".

Last updated: 1996-12-13

Standard Generalized Markup Language

<language, text>

(SGML) A generic markup language for representing documents. SGML is an International Standard that describes the relationship between a document's content and its structure. SGML allows document-based information to be shared and re-used across applications and computer platforms in an open, vendor-neutral format. SGML is sometimes compared to SQL, in that it enables companies to structure information in documents in an open fashion, so that it can be accessed or re-used by any SGML-aware application across multiple platforms.

SGML is defined in "ISO 8879:1986 Information processing -- Text and office systems -- Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)", an ISO standard produced by JTC 1/SC 18 and amended by "Amendment 1:1988".

Unlike other common document file formats that represent both content and presentation, SGML represents a document's content data and structure (interrelationships among the data). Removing the presentation from content establishes a neutral format. SGML documents and the information in them can easily be re-used by publishing and non-publishing applications.

SGML identifies document elements such as titles, paragraphs, tables, and chapters as distinct objects, allowing users to define the relationships between the objects for structuring data in documents. The relationships between document elements are defined in a Document Type Definition (DTD). This is roughly analogous to a collection of field definitions in a database. Once a document is converted into SGML and the information has been 'tagged', it becomes a database-like document. It can be searched, printed or even programmatically manipulated by SGML-aware applications.

Companies are moving their documents into SGML for several reasons:

Reuse - separation of content from presentation facilitates multiple delivery formats like CD-ROM and electronic publishing.

Portability - SGML is an international, platform-independent, standard based on ASCII text, so companies can safely store their documents in SGML without being tied to any one vendor.

Interchange - SGML is a core data standard that enables SGML-aware applications to inter-operate and share data seamlessly.

A central SGML document store can feed multiple processes in a company, so managing and updating information is greatly simplified. For example, when an aeroplane is delivered to a customer, it comes with thousands of pages of documentation. Distributing these on paper is expensive, so companies are investigating publishing on CD-ROM. If a maintenance person needs a guide for adjusting a plane's flight surfaces, a viewing tool automatically assembles the relevant information from the document repository as a complete document. SGML can be used to define attributes to information stored in documents such as security levels.

There are few clear leaders in the SGML industry which, in 1993, was estimated to be worth US $520 million and is projected to grow to over US $1.46 billion by 1998.

A wide variety tools can be used to create SGML systems. The SGML industry can be separated into the following categories:

Mainstream Authoring consists of the key word processing vendors like Lotus, WordPerfect and Microsoft.

SGML Editing and Publishing includes traditional SGML authoring tools like ArborText, Interleaf, FrameBuilder and SoftQuad Author/Editor.

SGML Conversions is one of the largest sectors in the market today because many companies are converting legacy data from mainframes, or documents created with mainstream word processors, into SGML.

Electronic Delivery is widely regarded as the most compelling reason companies are moving to SGML. Electronic delivery enables users to retrieve information on-line using an intelligent document viewer.

Document Management may one day drive a major part of the overall SGML industry.

SGML Document Repositories is one of the cornerstone technologies that will affect the progress of SGML as a data standard.

Since 1998, almost all development in SGML has been focussed on XML - a simple (and therefore easier to understand and implement) subset of SGML.

"ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN" defines some characters. [How are these related to ISO 8859-1?].

ISO catalogue entry.

SGML parsers are available from VU, NL, FSU, UIO, Norway.

standard input/output

<programming, operating system>

The predefined input/output channels which every Unix process is initialised with. Standard input is by default from the terminal, and standard output and standard error are to the terminal. Each of these channels (controlled via a file descriptor 0, 1, or 2 - stdin, stdout, stderr) can be redirected to a file, another device or a pipe connecting its process to another process. The process is normally unaware of such I/O redirection, thus simplifying prototyping of combinations of commands.

The C programming language library includes routines to perform basic operations on standard I/O. Examples are "printf", allowing text to be sent to standard output, and "scanf", allowing the program to read from standard input.

Last updated: 1996-06-07

Standard Instrument Control Library

(SICL) A platform-independent API for software to control and test electronic instruments conforming to IEEE 488.

Last updated: 1995-01-05

standard interpretation

standard semantics

standard I/O

standard input/output

Standard Lisp

A subset of Lisp 1.5 developed by A. Hearn primarily for implementing REDUCE. It was replaced by Portable Sandard LISP.

["Standard LISP Report", J. Marti et al, SIGPLAN Notices 14(10):48-58 (Oct 1979)].

Last updated: 1994-11-04

Standard ML

<language>

(SML) Originally an attempt by Robin Milner <[email protected]> ca. 1984 to unify the dialects of ML, SML has evolved into a robust general-purpose language. Later versions have been maintained by D. B. MacQueen, Lal George <[email protected]>, and J. H. Reppy <[email protected]> at AT&T, and A. W. Appel <[email protected]>.

SML is functional, with imperative programming features. It is environment based and strict. It adds to ML the call-by-pattern of Hope, recursive data types, reference types, typed exceptions, and modules. (The "core" language excludes the modules).

Standard ML is polymorphically typed and its module system supports flexible yet secure large-scale programming. Standard ML of New Jersey is an optimising native-code compiler for Standard ML that is written in Standard ML. It runs on a wide range of architectures. The distribution also contains: an extensive library - The Standard ML of New Jersey Library, including detailed documentation; Concurrent ML (CML); eXene - an elegant interface to X11 (based on CML); SourceGroup - a separate compilation and "make" facility.

Implementations: SML/NJ, POPLOG ML, Poly/ML, Edinburgh SML, ANU ML, Micro ML, lazy sml2c.

sml2c compiles to C. See also ML Kit.

Version 0.93 runs on 68000, SPARC, MIPS, HPPA, RS/6000, Intel 386, Intel 486 and Macintosh.

Manual.

FTP from ATT. FTP from Suny SB.

Mailing list: [email protected].

["A Proposal for Standard ML", R. Milner, ACM Symp on LISP and Functional Prog 1984, pp. 184-197].

Last updated: 1995-12-24

Standard ML of New Jersey

(SML/NJ) An implementation of SML by Andrew Appel at Princeton <[email protected]> and Dave MacQueen at AT&T. Version 0.93.

["Standard ML of New Jersey", A. Appel et al, "Proc Third Intl Symp on Prog Lang Impl and Logic Programming", LNCS Springer 1991].

Versions for Unix, Mac. ftp://cs.yale.edu/pub/ml, ftp://research.att.com/dist/ml. Mailing list: [email protected].

Standard Operating Environment

<standard>

(SOE) A specification of the architecture, operating systems, application set and configuration of computers within an organisation.

Last updated: 2007-06-11

standard semantics

The standard interpretation of a term in some language yields the term's standard denotational semantics, i.e. its "meaning". This is usually given by a semantic function which maps a term in the abstract syntax to a point in some domain. The domain is the interpretation of the term's type. The semantic function also takes an environment - a function which maps the free variables of the term to their meaning. We say that a domain point "denotes", or "is the denotation of", a term. A non-standard semantics results from some other interpretation, e.g. an abstract interpretation.

Standard Widget Toolkit

<graphics, programming, standard>

(SWT) The Eclipse Foundation's framework for developing graphical user interfaces in Java. SWT is written in explicitly standard Java but uses the Java Native Interface to talk to a platform-native GUI library. SWT is the third major attempt to give Java a decent GUI framework, following AWT and Swing. Of the three, SWT is the most consistent with the native GUIs but its programming model is hard to port to non-Windows platforms.

Wikipedia.

Last updated: 2004-12-21

St Andrews Static Language

<language>

(SASL) A functional programming language designed by Professor David Turner in 1976 whilst at St. Andrews University. SASL is a derivative of ISWIM with infinite data structures. It is fully lazy but weakly typed. It was designed for teaching functional programming, with very simple syntax.

Example syntax:

 def fac n =
    n = 0 -> 1 ; n x fac(n-1)

A version of the expert system EMYCIN has been written in SASL.

SASL was originally known as "St Andrews Standard Language". Not to be confused with SISAL.

ftp://a.cs.uiuc.edu/uiuc/kamin.distr/distr/sasl.p. See also Kamin's interpreters.

["A New Implementation Technique for Applicative Languages", D.A. Turner, Soft Prac & Exp 8:31-49 (1979)].

Last updated: 2007-03-21

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

<body, education>

(SAIL) /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ An important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the Unix community, one of the major wellsprings of technical innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the WAITS entry for details). The SAIL machines were shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 2001-06-22

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language

<language>

(SAIL) Dan Swinehart & Bob Sproull, Stanford AI Project, 1970. A large ALGOL 60-like language for the DEC-10 and DEC-20. Its main feature is a symbolic data system based upon an associative store (originally called LEAP). Items may be stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples). Processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and record garbage collection. Block- structured macros. "Recent Developments in SAIL - An ALGOL-based Language for Artificial Intelligence", J. Feldman et al, Proc FJCC 41(2), AFIPS (Fall 1972). (See MAINSAIL).

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL (the place). It was an ALGOL 60 derivative with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.

A number of interesting software systems were coded in SAIL, including early versions of FTP and TeX and a document formatting system called PUB.

In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systems for the PDP-10: WAITS (Stanford), ITS (MIT), TOPS-10 (DEC), CMU TOPS-10 (CMU), TENEX (BBN), and TOPS-20 (DEC, after TENEX).

SAIL was ported from WAITS to ITS so that MIT researchers could make use of software developed at Stanford University. Every port usually required the rewriting of I/O code in each application.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 2001-06-22

Stanford Research Institute

Former name of SRI International.

Stanford University

<education>

A University in the city of Palo Alto, California, noted for work in computing, especially artificial intelligence. See SAIL.

Last updated: 2003-02-28

STAPLE

<language>

A programming language written at Manchester (University?) and used at ICL in the early 1970s for writing the test suites. STAPLE was based on Algol 68 and had a very advanced optimising compiler.

Last updated: 2003-02-28

Staple

<language>

St Andrews Applicative Persistent Language. Language combining functional programming with persistent storage, developed at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Tony Davie, <[email protected]>.

Last updated: 2007-03-22

STAR 0

Early system on Datatron 200 series. Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May 1959).

StarBurst

An active DBMS from IBM Almaden Research Center.

StarDict

<software>

A cross-platform, open source, international dictionary application. StarDict provides glob and fuzzy queries. It uses Gtk for its graphical interface and is available for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows and MacOS.

sdcv is a command-line version.

Home.

Last updated: 2020-05-07

StarDict console version

<software>

(sdcv) A Linux command line program to query dictionaries in StarDict format.

Home

Last updated: 2020-05-07

StarLISP

*LISP

StarMOD

*MOD

star network

<networking>

A network topology where every node has a direct connection (only) to the central node, which might be a hub, switch, or server.

Last updated: 1999-10-29

Starset

Portable storage/retrieval language for distributed databases. "Starset programming Language", M.M. Gilula et al, Nauka, Moscow 1991, ISBN 5-02-006831-4.

STARSYS

Convergent Technologies Operating System

start bit

<protocol>

A bit which signals the start of transmission of a character on a serial line. For an RS-423 signal, the line is normally at logical zero which there is no data and the start bit is a logical one. The zero-one transition tells the receiver when to start sampling the signal to extract the data bits.

[Is this upside-down?]

Last updated: 1995-02-02

start of authority

<networking>

(SOA) A type of resource record used by the Domain Name System (DNS) to give metadata about a set of domain name data (the contents of a "zone file"). An SOA record has the following parameters:

Serial: the zone serial number - a version number for the zone file.

Refresh: the number of seconds between update requests from secondary and slave name servers.

Retry: the number of seconds the secondary or slave will wait before retrying when an attempt fails.

Expire: (time to live - TTL) the number of seconds a master or slave will wait before considering cached data out-of-date.

Minimum: previously used to determine the minimum TTL, this offers negative caching.

Last updated: 2007-05-11

Start Of Header

<character>

(SOH) mnemonic for ASCII 1.

[What header?]

Last updated: 1996-05-31

Start Of Text

<character>

(STX) Mnemonic for ASCII 2.

Last updated: 1996-05-31

start tag

tag

stat

<programming, operating system>

The Unix system call to get the properties of a file or directory.

stat is called like this:

 struct stat s;
 if (stat("/path/to/file", &s)) { /* handle error */ }

This will fill the struct with the following data: id of device containing file, inode number, permissions (mode), number of hard links, user id of owner, group id of owner, device id (if special file), total size in bytes, block size for file system I/O, number of 512B blocks allocated, time of last access, time of last modification, time of last status change.

If stat is called on a symbolic link, it returns the properties of the link's target. Variant lstat returns the properties of the link itself.

Variant fstat takes a file descriptor instead of a path.

Unix manual page: stat(2).

Last updated: 2018-09-04

state

<storage, architecture, jargon, theory>

How something is; its configuration, attributes, condition or information content. The state of a system is usually temporary (i.e. it changes with time) and volatile (i.e. it will be lost or reset to some initial state if the system is switched off).

A state may be considered to be a point in some space of all possible states. A simple example is a light, which is either on or off. A complex example is the electrical activation in a human brain while solving a problem.

In computing and related fields, states, as in the light example, are often modelled as being discrete (rather than continuous) and the transition from one state to another is considered to be instantaneous. Another (related) property of a system is the number of possible states it may exhibit. This may be finite or infinite. A common model for a system with a finite number of discrete state is a finite state machine.

[Jargon File]

Last updated: 1996-10-13

state diagram

state transition diagram

stateless

A stateless server is one which treats each request as an independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request. This simplifies the server design because it does not need to allocate storage to deal with conversations in progress or worry about freeing it if a client dies in mid-transaction. A disadvantage is that it may be necessary to include more information in each request and this extra information will need to be interpreted by the server each time.

An example of a stateless server is a web server. These take in requests (URLs) which completely specify the required document and do not require any context or memory of previous requests.

Contrast this with a traditional FTP server which conducts an interactive session with the user. A request to the server for a file can assume that the user has been authenticated and that the current directory and transfer mode have been set.

state machine

finite state machine

statement

<programming>

A single instruction in a computer program written in a procedural language. Typical examples are an assignment statement, an if statement (conditional), a loop statement ("while", "for", "repeat", "until", etc.), a procedure call, a procedure exit, function return statement, switch statement or goto statement.

In many languages, one or more simple statements can be executed sequentially as a compound statement, e.g. bracketed between "begin" and "end" or "" and "" which can then appear in place of a simple statement in an "if" or loop.

Each statement in a high-level language will typically be translated into several machine code instructions by a compiler or, alternatively, executed by an interpreter.

Last updated: 2009-10-23

state transition diagram

A diagram consisting of circles to represent states and directed line segments to represent transitions between the states. One or more actions (outputs) may be associated with each transition. The diagram represents a finite state machine.

State University of New York

<body>

(SUNY) The public university system of New York State, USA, with campuses throughout the state.

Last updated: 1995-03-01

static

<programming>

static typing, static variable.

<storage>

static random-access memory.

<web>

static content.

<theory, programming>

static analysis.

statically typed

static typing

static analysis

<theory, programming>

A family of techniques of program analysis where the program is not actually executed (as opposed to dynamic analysis), but is analyzed by tools to produce useful information.

Static analysis techniques range from the most mundane (statistics on the density of comments, for instance) to the more complex, semantics-based techniques.

Qualities sought in static analysis techniques are soundness and completeness.

Last updated: 2003-04-12

static database management system

<database>

(static DBMS) A database consisting of "information-based relationships", one that is rigorously structured to facilitate retrieval and update in terms of inherent relationships. This creates a static environment wherein the locations of the related records are already known. Typical static DBMS are either hierarchical (IMS, System 2000) or a CODACYL (network or plex) DBMS (such as TOTAL, IDMS, IDS, DMS-2). These environments facilitate rapid, high volume processing of data.

The opposite is a dynamic database management system.

Last updated: 1998-10-07

static DBMS

static database management system

static link

<compiler>

(Or "access link" or "environment link") A pointer from an activation record to the activation record for the textually enclosing scope. A static link is only required in a statically (lexically) scoped language.

The number of static links to follow may be determined statically (at compile time). It is simply the difference in lexical nesting depth between the declaration and the reference.

static method

<programming>

In object-oriented programming, a function packaged along with a given class; not really a method at all.

For example, a String class might include a static method, concatenate(), which returns its arguments joined into one string. It might be called like this:

 print String.concatenate("FOL", "DOC");

which would print "FOLDOC".

The same result might be achieved with a real object method, append(), which returns its argument string appended to the object it is invoked on, e.g.:

 String s = "FOL";
 print s.append("DOC");

While the syntax looks similar, the two are completely different. The static method is just a function called "String.concatenate" which can be resolved to the address of some code at compile time (or load time if the String class is dynamically loaded). When invoking an object method, the class of the object is not generally known until run time so method lookup is a run-time process.

Last updated: 2014-09-06

static nested scope

<programming>

Where the scope of an identifier is fixed at compile-time to be the smallest block (begin/end, function, or procedure body) containing the identifier's declaration. This means that an identifier declared in some block is only accessible within that block and from procedures declared within it.

This term is used in the Python community.

Compare lexical scope.

Last updated: 2002-02-18

static nested scoping

static nested scope

static RAM

static random-access memory

<storage>

(SRAM) Random-access memory in which each bit of storage is a bistable flip-flop, commonly consisting of cross-coupled inverters. It is called "static" because it will retain a value as long as power is supplied, unlike dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) which must be regularly refreshed. It is however, still volatile, i.e. it will lose its contents when the power is switched off, in contrast to ROM.

SRAM is usually faster than DRAM but since each bit requires several transistors (about six) you can get less bits of SRAM in the same area. It usually costs more per bit than DRAM and so is used for the most speed-critical parts of a computer (e.g. cache memory) or other circuit.

Last updated: 1995-04-22

static scope

lexical scope

static typing

<programming>

Enforcement of type rules at compile time rather than at run time. Static typing catches more errors at compile time than dynamic typing.

Ada, C, C++, Haskell, Java, and ML are examples of statically typed languages.

Statically typed languages may have strong typing or weak typing.

Last updated: 2004-07-20

static variable

<programming>

A kind of local variable in certain programming languages that retains its value even when program execution moves outside its scope. This contrasts with an ordinary, automatic variable, which is reinitialised (possibly to an undefined value) every time the block is entered.

Static variables have a fixed location in the data section of the program's address space whereas automatic variables are typically allocated on the stack.

Last updated: 2009-12-14

Station Management

<networking>

(SMT) Station Management One of the 4 key FDDI component layers. SMT is an overlay function that handles the management of the FDDI ring. It handles neighbor identification, fault detection and reconfiguration, insertion and de-insertion from the ring, and traffic statistics monitoring.

Last updated: 1997-05-11

Statistical Analysis System

<language>

(SAS) A statistical and matrix handling language with PL/I-like syntax.

["A User's Guide to SAS", A.J. Barr, SAS Inst 1976].

Last updated: 1994-12-12

Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

<statistics, tool>

(SPSS) The flagship program of SPSS, Inc., written in the late 1960s.

["SPSS X User's Guide", SPSS, Inc. 1986].

[Details?]

Last updated: 1999-07-20

statistical time division multiplexing

<communications>

(STDM, StatMUX) A system developed to overcome some inefficiencies of standard time division multiplexing, where time slices are still allocated to channels, even if they have no information to transmit.

STDM uses a variable time slot length and by allowing channels to vie for any free slot space. It employs a buffer memory which temporarily stores the data during periods of peak traffic. This scheme allows STDM to waste no high-speed line time with inactive channels. STDM requires each transmission to carry identification information (i.e. a channel identifier). To reduce the cost of this overhead, a number of characters for each channel are grouped together for transmission.

["Data Communications, Computer Networks and Open Systems", Halsall & Fred, Addison Wesley, p160-161, 1995].

["Digital, Analog, and Data Communication", Sinnema & McGovern, Prentice Hall, p245, 1986].

Last updated: 1997-03-05

statistics

<statistics, mathematics>

The practice, study or result of the application of mathematical functions to collections of data in order to summarise or extrapolate that data.

The subject of statistics can be divided into descriptive statistics - describing data, and analytical statistics - drawing conclusions from data.

Last updated: 1997-07-16

StatMUX

statistical time division multiplexing

status

<hardware>

1. A description of how something is, similar to state but usually implying a simpler set of possibilities, e.g. up or down; set or clear; stopped, starting, started, stopping.

In CPU hardware, the status register stores bits of information about the outcome of previous operations, e.g. zero, overflow. These status bits can be used to control conditional execution, e.g. "branch if zero". The same idea is common in other hardware, e.g. an input peripheral with a status bit to indicate end of file.

<operating system>

2. Under the Unix operating system, a process terminates with an exit status - an integer value where zero indicates successful or normal completion and non-zero values indicate different error conditions.

<standard>

3. Standards and other forms of documentation can have different statuses such as "proposal", request for comments or accepted by some official body.

Last updated: 2018-09-01

Nearby terms:

SSO ♦ SSR ♦ st ♦ ST-506 ♦ STAB ♦ STAB-11 ♦ stable ♦ stable sort ♦ STAC ♦ stac compression

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