splat 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.
2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII 35). 3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a Mac (same as alt). 4. An obsolete name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for "tensor product". 5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character. See also ASCII. [Jargon File] Last updated: 1995-01-19
