From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
barf
n 1: the matter ejected in vomiting [syn: {vomit}, {vomitus},
{puke}, {barf}]
v 1: eject the contents of the stomach through the mouth; "After
drinking too much, the students vomited"; "He purged
continuously"; "The patient regurgitated the food we gave
him last night" [syn: {vomit}, {vomit up}, {purge}, {cast},
{sick}, {cat}, {be sick}, {disgorge}, {regorge}, {retch},
{puke}, {barf}, {spew}, {spue}, {chuck}, {upchuck}, {honk},
{regurgitate}, {throw up}] [ant: {keep down}]
From The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003) [jargon]:
barf
/barf/, n.,v.
[common; from mainstream slang meaning ?vomit?]
1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the
Valspeak ?gag me with a spoon?. (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}.
2. vi. To say ?Barf!? or emit some similar expression of disgust. ?I showed
him my latest hack and he barfed? means only that he complained about it,
not that he literally vomited.
3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input, perhaps with a
suitable error message, perhaps not. Examples: ?The division operation
barfs if you try to divide by 0.? (That is, the division operation checks
for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the
operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) ?The
text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the
old one.?
See {choke}. In Commonwealth Hackish, barf is generally replaced by ?puke?
or ?vom?. {barf} is sometimes also used as a {metasyntactic variable}, like
{foo} or {bar}.
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