Hi Pascal.

22-Dec-03 15:29:58, Pascal Schmidt wrote to Roy J. Tellason


 PS> Hi Roy! :-)

 PS> [TANSTAAFL]
 RJT>> Actually I think the expression was around long before that,
 RJT>> though it does indeed appear in that book...
 PS> Well, the New Hacker's Dictonary claims the book is the origin of
 PS> the phrase, though that may of course only apply to the hacker
 PS> (sub)culture. ;

from 4.3.0 of the jargon file ( ISTR  tNHD was based on version 2.3 ?)

:TANSTAAFL: /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF
   novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".] "There Ain't No
Such Thing As A
   Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of
   using an unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique, or at the poor quality of
   some piece of software, or at the {signal-to-noise ratio} of unmoderated
   Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database
   back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you
   know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration
   of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see
   {Appendix B} for discussion).

   Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL ("There is No Such
   Thing...") is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952 in
   the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen
   from it by mutation.

www.jargon.org  for more info, downloads, etc.

 -=> Bye <=-

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