Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.

PICO

Specialty Definition: PICO

Top     

Specialty Definition: Pico

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Pico has several meanings:

• Pico, SI numeric prefix meaning 10^-12
• Pico text editor for Unix computer systems
• Pico (Azores), an island and its volcano in the Azores
• Pico programming language, developed at VUB

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pico."

Top     

Pico (Azores)

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Pico (Ilha do Pico) is an island of the Azores noted for its eponymous volcano, the highest mountain in the Azores.

The island is 17.5 km south of São Jorge (Ilha de São Jorge) and just 7 km west of Fayal (Ilha do Faial). It is 42 km long, has a maximum width of 15 km and an area of 447 km² making the second largest of the Azore islands. The main settlements are the capital Madalena, São Roque do Pico and Lajes do Pico, the total population is around 15,000.

The volcano is to the south-west of the island at 38.47 N, 28.40 W, it is a basaltic stratocone 2,350 m high with steep sides. The last eruption was in 1963, prior major eruptions were in 1562-64, 1718 and 1720. The paths of the lava flows are still visible, those of the 16th century and 1718 were particularly substantial, extending for over 10 km.

The island supported a substantial whaling industry until 1980. The position of the island to the edge of the continental shelf means that deep water is very close. Active industries include tourism, ship-building and wine production.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pico (Azores)."

Top     

Pico programming language

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Pico is a programming language developed at the PROG lab at the dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB). The language was created to introduce the essentials of programming to non computer science students. While designing Pico, the PROG lab was inspired by the Abelson and Sussman's book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Furthermore they were influenced by the teaching of programming at high school or academic level.

Pico can be seen as an effort to generate a palatable and enjoyable language for people who don't want to study hard for the elegance and power of a language. They've done it by adapting Scheme's syntax and semantics.

Pico should be interpreted as 'small', the idea was to create a small language for educational purposes.

Language Elements

Comments

Comments are surrounded by a backquote (`).

Variables

Variables are dynamically typed, pico uses a static scope.

var: value

Functions

Functions are first-class objects in Pico. They can be assigned to variables. For example a function with two arguments arg1 and arg2 can be defined as

func(arg1, arg2): ...

Functions can be called with the following syntax:

func(value1, value2)

Operators

Operators can be used as prefix or infix in Pico:

+(5, 2)
5 + 2

Data Types

Pico has the following types: string, char, integer, real and tables.

Tables are compound datastructures that may contain any of the regular datatypes.

Boolean types are represented by functions, in the same way as lambda calculus does.

Control Structures

Conditional Evaluation

Only the usual if statement is included

if(condition, then, else)

Code Snippets

display('Hello World', eoln)

max(a, b):
 if(a < b, b, a)

Implementations

• MacPico
• WinPico This version is buggy
• TextPico for Linux

External links

• Pico Homepage
• PROG lab
• Department of Computer Science at VUB
• VUB

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pico programming language."

Top     

Pico SI Prefix

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Pico (symbol p) is a SI prefix in the SI system of units denoting a factor of 10^-12.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pico SI Prefix."

Top     

Pico text editor

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Pico is a text editor for Unix computer systems, and is integrated with the Pine email client, designed by Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.

Taken from the Pine FAQ at http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/whatis.html -- "Pine's message composition editor is also available as a separate stand-alone program, called PICO. PICO is a very simple and easy-to-use text editor offering paragraph justification, cut/paste, and a spelling checker."

Pico is generally used by those who are new to UNIX, but many experienced users compose email with it as well.

The GNU project has a clone of Pico called Nano. Nano was developed because Pico's license is not considered to be a free software license.

See also:

• Nano text editor
• Pine email client

External Links:

• The Pine Information Center at the University of Washington

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Pico text editor."

Top     

SI prefix

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

An SI prefix is a prefix which can be applied to any unit of the International System of Units (SI) to give subdivisions and multiples of that unit.

For example, the prefix "kilo" multiplies by one thousand, so a kilometre is 1,000 metres, and a kilowatt is 1,000 watts. The prefix "milli" subdivides by a thousand, so a millimetre is one thousandth of a metre (1,000 millimetres in a metre), and a millilitre is one thousandth of a litre. The ability to apply the same prefixes to any SI unit is one of the key strengths of the SI, since it considerably simplifies the system's learning and use.

The most commonly used prefixes include:

giga = 10⁹, US billion or European milliard, a thousand million

mega = million

kilo = thousand

centi = one hundredth

milli = one thousandth

The full table follows below.

(Sub)multiple	Prefix	Symbol	Name (Americas)	Name (European)
1024	yotta	Y	Septillion	Quadrillion
1021	zetta	Z	Sextillion	Thousand trillion (Trilliard)
1018	exa	E	Quintillion	Trillion
1015	peta	P	Quadrillion	Thousand billion (Billiard)
1012	tera	T	Trillion	Billion
109	giga	G	Billion	Thousand million (Milliard)
106	mega	M	Million
103	kilo	k	Thousand
102	hecto	h	Hundred
101	deca or deka	da	Ten
10-1	deci	d	Tenth
10-2	centi	c	Hundredth
10-3	milli	m	Thousandth
10-6	micro	μ	Millionth
10-9	nano	n	Billionth	Milliardth
10-12	pico	p	Trillionth	Billionth
10-15	femto	f	Quadrillionth	Billiardth
10-18	atto	a	Quintillionth	Trillionth
10-21	zepto	z	Sextillionth	Trilliardth
10-24	yocto	y	Septillionth	Quadrillionth

Examples:

• 5 cm = 5 × 10^-2 m = 5 × 0.01 m = 0.05 m
• 3 MW = 3 × 10⁶ W = 3 × 1 000 000 W = 3 000 000 W

The prefix always takes precedence over any exponentiation; thus km² means square kilometre and not kilo - square metre. For example, 3 km² is equal to 3,000,000 m² and not to 3,000 m² (nor to 9,000,000 m²).

Prefixes where the exponent is divisible by three are recommended. Hence '100 metres' rather than 'one hectometre'. Notable exceptions include centimetre, hectare (hecto-are), centilitre, and 1 dm³ (equivalent to one litre).

The accepted pronunciation of the initial G of "giga-" was once soft, /ˈdʒaɪgə/ (like "gigantic"), but now the hard pronunciation, /ˈgɪgə/, is probably more common.

Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is lower case "k".

Use outside SI

The abbreviation "k" is often used to mean a multiple of a thousand, so one may talk of "a 40K salary" (40,000), or the Y2K problem.

Non-SI units

SI prefixes rarely appear coupled with imperial units except in some specialised cases (e.g. megaton). They are often used with cgs units in situations where these are still found (e.g. millitorr). They are also used with "natural" units in some fields (e.g. megaelectron volt, gigaparsec).

Computing

k and greater are common in computing, where they are applied to information and storage units like the bit and the byte. Since these often naturally come in powers of two, the prefixes' meaning changes:

K = 2¹⁰ = 1,024

M = 2²⁰ = 1,048,576

G = 2³⁰ = 1,073,741,824

T = 2⁴⁰ = 1,099,511,627,776

P = 2⁵⁰ = 1,125,899,906,842,624.

However, these prefixes usually retain their powers-of-1000 meanings when used to describe rates of data communication (bit rates): 10 Mb/s Ethernet runs at 10,000,000 b/s, not 10,485,760 b/s.

This inconsistency did not seem relevant when computers had little storage and communication links were relatively slow, but the increasing capacity of computing systems and speed of network links began making this inconsistency a more serious problem.

Accordingly, the International Electrotechnical Commission adopted new binary prefixes in 1998, formed from the first syllable of the decimal prefix plus 'bi' (pronounced 'bee'). The symbol is the decimal symbol plus 'i'. So now, one kilobyte (1 kB) equals 1000 bytes, whereas one kibibyte (1 KiB) equals 2¹⁰ = 1024 bytes. Likewise mebi (2²⁰), gibi (2³⁰), tebi (2⁴⁰), pebi (2⁵⁰), and exbi (2⁶⁰). For example, at 1 MB/s = 10⁶ bytes per second, it would take slightly longer than one second to transfer an object 1 MiB = 2²⁰ bytes in size. The adoption of these prefixes has been very limited.

For more information on these power-of-two prefixes, see Binary prefixes.

See also Orders of magnitude.

^† Britain, Ireland and Australia previously used the European number name conventions, but have now largely switched to US usage. Note in particular that above a million and below a millionth, the same name has different values in the two naming systems, so billion and trillion (for example) become unfortunately potentially ambiguous terms internationally. Using the SI prefixes can circumvent this problem. See number names for the details.

This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "SI prefix."

Top     

Top     

Modern Usage: PICO

Top     

Commercial Usage: PICO

Top     

Image Slideshow: PICO

Photos: PICO More pictures...

Illustrations: PICO More pictures...

Top     

Photo Album: PICO

Thumbnail	Description & Credit	Thumbnail	Description & Credit
	At the summit of the top of the Pico volcanic cone in the Azores. At left is J. Richard. Plate VII, print 6. In: "Results of the Scientific Campaigns of the Prince of Monaco." Vol. 89. Credit: Sailing for Science - the NOAA Fleet Then and Now.		Pico Torquino in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba's highest mountain, 1974 meters. Credit: Small World.
	Native guide on Pico Torquino. Credit: Small World.		Mt. Pico, Mt. Killington, and Mt. Shrewsbury from Rutland R.R., Green Mountains. Credit: Library of Congress.
Source: pictures compiled by the editor from various references; see picture credits.

Top     

Digital Photo Gallery: PICO
 

"Pico" by Ibon San Martin Commentary: "Wall full of granite triangles. ."

Source: photographs selected by the editor, with permission from the photographers.

Top     

Usage Frequency: PICO

Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.

Top     

Name Usage Frequency: PICO

Top     

Usage in Company Names: PICO

Source: compiled by the editor from Icon Group International, Inc.

Top     

Expressions: PICO

Top     

Frequency of Internet Keywords: PICO

Top     

Modern Translation: PICO

Top     

Derivations & Misspellings: PICO

Top     

Anagrams: PICO

Top