TACL Reference Manual

Glossary
HP NonStop TACL Reference Manual—429513-018
Glossary-6
macro.
macro. A named sequence of one or more instructions invoked by the appearance of the
macro name. When a macro is invoked, TACL replaces arguments of the form %n%
with actual arguments passed to it and returns, as a result, the instructions that define
the macro, including argument values.
message system. A set of operating system procedures and data structures that handles
the mechanics of exchanging messages between processes.
metacharacter. A character that directs TACL to evaluate subsequent text in a special
way.
mom. A process that is notified when certain other processes are deleted. When a process
is part of a process pair, the mom of the process is the other member of the pair. When
a process is unnamed, its mom is usually the process that created it. monitor. A
process that, among other functions, is responsible for checking that certain other
processes continue to run. If a process should stop, it is the monitor’s responsibility to
restart it.
multibyte character set. A means for identifying written characters for national languages
that require more than one byte to represent a single character.
named process. A process to which a process name was assigned when the process was
created. Contrast with unnamed process.
node. A system of one or more processor modules. Typically, a node is linked with other
nodes to form a network.
node name. The portion of a file name that identifies the system through which the file can
be accessed.
nonretryable error. An error condition returned by the file system that cannot be recovered
by retrying the operation even after operator intervention. Contrast with retryable error.
NonStop Advanced Architecture. The H-series architecture that allows up to three levels
of redundancy. Logical processors consist of one to three physical processors known
as processor elements (PEs). The logical processor is equivalent to the term CPU. For
availability issues, the processor elements are all located on different circuit boards.
These boards are known as blade elements (or slices) and are identified by the letters
A, B, or C.
NonStop Blade Element. See slice
. Also known as Blade Element.
NonStop SQL/MP. A relational database management system that provides efficient online
access to large distributed databases.
nowait I/O. An operation with an I/O device where the process does not wait for the I/O
operation to finish. Contrast with waited I/O.
NSAA. See NonStop Advanced Architecture.