if only for esthetic reasons.

:barney: n. In Commonwealth hackish, `barney' is to {fred}
(sense #1) as {bar} is to {foo}. That is, people who
commonly use `fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will
often use `barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred
Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.

:baroque: adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on
excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has
many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is
less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Metafont even has
features to introduce random variations to its letterform output.
Now *that* is baroque!" See also {rococo}.

:BartleMUD: /bar'tl-muhd/ n. Any of the MUDs derived from the
original MUD game by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw (see
{MUD}). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly
offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in
object descriptions, so a player is likely to come across
`brand172', for instance (see {brand brand brand}). Bartle has
taken a bad rap in some MUDding circles for supposedly originating
this term, but (like the story that MUD is a trademark) this
appears to be a myth; he uses `MUD1'.

:BASIC: n. A programming language, originally designed for
Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s,
which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in
proto-hackers. This is another case (like {Pascal}) of the bad
things that happen when a language deliberately designed as an