unixism

   A  piece  of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected
   multi-tasking  environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead
   that   exists  on  virtual-memory  Unix  systems.  Common  {unixism}s
   include:  gratuitous  use  of  fork(2);  the  assumption that certain
   undocumented  but  well-known  features  of  Unix  libraries  such as
   stdio(3)  are supported elsewhere; reliance on {obscure} side-effects
   of  system  calls  (use  of  sleep(2)  with  a 0 argument to clue the
   scheduler  that  you're  willing  to  give  up  your  time-slice, for
   example); the assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and
   the  assumption  that  fragmentation  problems won't arise from never
   free()ing memory. Compare {vaxocentrism}; see also {New Jersey}.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {unixism}]