when and where did the "words" dar, alm, and doh, originate....i constantly use alm, and especially dar, and doh. what other words were these derived from, or are all other words derived from them? This is a question that plagues us all. Where did these wonderful examples of engineering our languages come from?

-- Pud (alandmar@cs.nmsu.edu), March 17, 1999

Answers

Sorry for the great delay here... I just got back from vacation in the not so great, not so white north.

"dar" originated from someone's dar idea of taking a digital data stream, running it through a DAC, running some analog compression on it, then running it through an ADC. UH-huh. Sure, that's really better than, say, LZ88. Or RLE. I think RLE actually performs better all around... that is, better compression, less expensive hardware, and overall faster compress and uncompress.

"Alm" and "doh" are both from Matt Groenig, by way of Homer J. Simpson. "Alm... donuts." "Doh!"

Anyway, that's that.

If you want to read more about "dar", check out My Dar Page. It's ugly.

-- William Baguhn (spqrspqr@hotmail.com), April 03, 1999.