Computer Science from the Bottom Up Glossary

A

Application Programming Interface

The set of variables and functions used to communicate between different parts of programs.

See Also Application Binary Interface.

Application Binary Interface

A technical description of how the operating system should interface with hardware.

See Also Application Programming Interface.

E

Extensible Markup Language

Some reasonable definition here.

See Also Standardised Generalised Markup Language.

Standardised Generalised Markup Language

The grand daddy of all documents

See Also Extensible Markup Language.

M

Mutually Exclusive

When a number of things are mutually exclusive, only one can be valid at a time. The fact that one of the things is valid makes the others invalid.

MMU

The memory managment unit component of the hardware architecture.

O

Open Source

Software distributed in source form under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute the code.

S

Shell

The interface used to interact with the operating system.