In computing, a discriminator is a field of characters designed to separate a certain element from others of the same identifier. As an example, suppose that a program must save two unique objects to memory, both of whose identifiers happen to be foo
. To ensure the two objects are not conflated, the program may assign discriminators to the objects in the form of numbers; thus, foo (1)
and foo (2)
distinguish both objects named foo
.
This has been adopted by programming languages as well as digital platforms for instant messaging and massively multiplayer online games.
A discriminator is used to disambiguate a user from other users who wish to identify under the same username.
On Discord, a discriminator is a four-digit suffix added to the end of a username. This allowed for up to 10000 user accounts to take the same name.
In 2023, co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote on a company blog post about the technical debt caused by the discriminator system, stating that the system resulted in nearly half of the company's friend requests failing to connect. The platform implemented discriminators in the early days of the service, he wrote. When the platform was initially introduced, the software developers' priority was to let its users take any username they want without receiving a “your desired username is taken” error. Discord had no friend system at first, thus letting people take names in different letter cases, making usernames case-sensitive. [1]
Discord also introduced a global display name system, wherein a user may input a default nickname to be shown on top of the messages they sent in lieu of their platform-wide username, Vishnevskiy touted on Reddit. [2]
The platform created a transition process to a system of pseudonyms wherein all new usernames would be case-insensitive lowercase and limited to the ASCII characters of A–Z, 0–9, the full stop and the underscore. The transition would happen over the course of months, with the accounts that were registered the oldest, and paid subscribers, receiving the opportunity to reserve their name earlier.
This change was criticized online for being a step backward, as users could be a risk of being impersonated. A notable indie game studio noted that it could no longer claim its own name on the platform. [3] Discord pointed to its processes for users with high visibility and longstanding business relationships with the company for reserving a username under the new system. The old discriminator-oriented system also mitigated the rush to get unique usernames for sale on the black market, leading to swatting and online harassment. [4] [2]
Battle.net implements a suffix of four-digit numbers to its usernames.
This section may be too technical for most readers to understand.(October 2011) |
A discriminator is a typed tag field present in the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, the interface description language of the Object Management Group. It exists as type and value definitions of tagged unions that determine which union member is selected in the current union instance. This is done by introduction of the classic C switch construct as part of the classic C union. [5] [6] Unlike in some conventional programming languages offering support for unions, the discriminator in IDL is not identical to the selected field name. Here is an example of an IDL union type definition:
unionRegisterswitch(char){case'a':case'b':shortAX;case'c':longEAX;default:octetAL;};
The effective value of the Register type may contain AX as the selected field, but the discriminator value may be either 'a' or 'b' and is stored in memory separately. Therefore, IDL logically separates information about the currently selected field name and the union effective value from information about the current discriminator value. In the example above, the discriminator value may be any of the following: 'a', 'b', 'c', as well as all other characters belonging to the IDL char
type, since the default
branch specified in the example Register type allows the use of the remaining characters as well.
The Microsoft Interface Definition Language also supports tagged unions, allowing to choose the discriminator via an attribute in an enclosing structure or function. [7]
A friend code is a unique twelve-digit number that could be exchanged with friends and be used to maintain individual friend lists in each video game. Friend codes were generated from an identifier unique to a copy of a game and the universally unique identifier corresponding to that of a user's device. [8]
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between systems on different operating systems, programming languages, and computing hardware. CORBA uses an object-oriented model although the systems that use the CORBA do not have to be object-oriented. CORBA is an example of the distributed object paradigm.
In computers, case sensitivity defines whether uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as distinct (case-sensitive) or equivalent (case-insensitive). For instance, when users interested in learning about dogs search an e-book, "dog" and "Dog" are of the same significance to them. Thus, they request a case-insensitive search. But when they search an online encyclopedia for information about the United Nations, for example, or something with no ambiguity regarding capitalization and ambiguity between two or more terms cut down by capitalization, they may prefer a case-sensitive search.
The Meta-Object Facility (MOF) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for model-driven engineering. Its purpose is to provide a type system for entities in the CORBA architecture and a set of interfaces through which those types can be created and manipulated. MOF may be used for domain-driven software design and object-oriented modelling.
An interface description language or interface definition language (IDL) is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs are usually used to describe data types and interfaces in a language-independent way, for example, between those written in C++ and those written in Java.
A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit label used to uniquely identify objects in computer systems. The term Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is also used, mostly in Microsoft systems.
In object-oriented (OO) and functional programming, an immutable object is an object whose state cannot be modified after it is created. This is in contrast to a mutable object, which can be modified after it is created. In some cases, an object is considered immutable even if some internally used attributes change, but the object's state appears unchanging from an external point of view. For example, an object that uses memoization to cache the results of expensive computations could still be considered an immutable object.
An HTML element is a type of HTML document component, one of several types of HTML nodes. The first used version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 and there have since been many versions of HTML. The current de facto standard is governed by the industry group WHATWG and is known as the HTML Living Standard.
In computer science, a tagged union, also called a variant, variant record, choice type, discriminated union, disjoint union, sum type, or coproduct, is a data structure used to hold a value that could take on several different, but fixed, types. Only one of the types can be in use at any one time, and a tag field explicitly indicates which type is in use. It can be thought of as a type that has several "cases", each of which should be handled correctly when that type is manipulated. This is critical in defining recursive datatypes, in which some component of a value may have the same type as that value, for example in defining a type for representing trees, where it is necessary to distinguish multi-node subtrees and leaves. Like ordinary unions, tagged unions can save storage by overlapping storage areas for each type, since only one is in use at a time.
This article compares two programming languages: C# with Java. While the focus of this article is mainly the languages and their features, such a comparison will necessarily also consider some features of platforms and libraries.
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The Data Distribution Service (DDS) for real-time systems is an Object Management Group (OMG) machine-to-machine standard that aims to enable dependable, high-performance, interoperable, real-time, scalable data exchanges using a publish–subscribe pattern.
RMI-IIOP denotes the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) interface over the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP), which delivers Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) distributed computing capabilities to the Java platform. It was initially based on two specifications: the Java Language Mapping to OMG IDL, and CORBA/IIOP 2.3.1.
In the context of the Microsoft Windows NT line of operating systems, a Security Identifier (SID) is a unique, immutable identifier of a user, user group, or other security principal. A security principal has a single SID for life, and all properties of the principal, including its name, are associated with the SID. This design allows a principal to be renamed without affecting the security attributes of objects that refer to the principal.
NTFS links are the abstraction used in the NTFS file system—the default file system for all Microsoft Windows versions belonging to the Windows NT family—to associate pathnames and certain kinds of metadata, with entries in the NTFS Master File Table (MFT). NTFS broadly adopts a pattern akin to typical Unix file systems in the way it stores and references file data and metadata; the most significant difference is that in NTFS, the MFT "takes the place of" inodes, fulfilling most of the functions which inodes fulfill in a typical Unix filesystem.
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In computer science, marshalling or marshaling is the process of transforming the memory representation of an object into a data format suitable for storage or transmission, especially between different runtimes. It is typically used when data must be moved between different parts of a computer program or from one program to another.
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OTP is a collection of useful middleware, libraries, and tools written in the Erlang programming language. It is an integral part of the open-source distribution of Erlang. The name OTP was originally an acronym for Open Telecom Platform, which was a branding attempt before Ericsson released Erlang/OTP as open source. However neither Erlang nor OTP is specific to telecom applications.
Rust is a general-purpose programming language emphasizing performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety, meaning that all references point to valid memory. It does so without a traditional garbage collector; instead, memory safety errors and data races are prevented by the "borrow checker", which tracks the object lifetime of references at compile time.
Discord is an instant messaging and VoIP social platform which allows communication through voice calls, video calls, text messaging, and media. Communication can be private or take place in virtual communities called "servers". A server is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels which can be accessed via invite links. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and in web browsers. As of 2024, the service has about 150 million monthly active users and 19 million weekly active servers. It is primarily used by gamers, although the share of users interested in other topics is growing. As of March 2024, Discord is the 30th most visited website in the world with 22.98% of its traffic coming from the United States. As of March 2022, Discord employs 600 people globally.