convention A hackish (and especially
MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms and abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms or abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not
Emacs") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently, there is a
Scheme compiler called
LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix!" - and a company with the name
CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support".
See also
mung.
[
Jargon File]
(1995-04-28)