meaning of filter
1. Any porous substance, as cloth, paper, sand, or charcoal, through which water or other liquid may passed to cleanse it from the solid or impure matter held in suspension; a chamber or device containing such substance; a strainer; also, a similar device for purifying air.
2. To purify or defecate, as water or other liquid, by causing it to pass through a filter.
3. To pass through a filter; to percolate.
4. Same as Philter.
5. filter 1. Originally Unix, now also MS-DOS A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline see plumbing. Compare sponge. 2. functional programming A higher-order function which takes a predicate and a list and returns those elements of the list for which the predicate is true. In Haskell: filter p [] = [] filter p x:xs = if p x then x : rest else rest where rest = filter p xs See also filter promotion. [Jargon File] filter promotion In a generate and test algorithm, combining part of the filter with the generator in order to reduce the number of potential solutions generated. A trivial example: filter < 100 [1. . 1000] ==> [1. . 99] where [1. . n] generates the list of integers from 1 to n. Here the filter has been combined completely with the generator. This is an example of fusion. FIMS Form Interface Management System. Finagles Law
Related Words
filter | filtered | filtering |
