Signature
1. A set of function symbols with arities.
2. <messaging> (Or sig) A few lines of information about the sender of an
electronic mail message or
news posting. Most
Unix mail and news software will
automagically append a signature from a file called .signature in the user's home directory to outgoing mail and news.
A signature should give your real name and your
e-mail address since, though these appear in the headers of your messages, they may be munged by intervening software.
It is currently (1994) hip to include the
URL of your
home page on the
World-Wide Web in your sig.
The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an
ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see
sig quote,
fool file).
However, large sigs are a waste of
bandwidth, and it has been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's prestige on the net.
See also
doubled sig,
sig virus.
2. <programming> A concept very similar to abstract base classes except that they have their own
hierarchy and can be applied to compiled classes.
Signatures provide a means of separating
subtyping and
inheritance.
They are implemented in
C++ as patches to
GCC 2.5.2 by Gerald Baumgartner <
[email protected]>.
(ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/gb/).
