Definition: moose	last revised by 127.0.0.1 on Aug 17, 2005 4:17 am

Taken from a message by Eric Hill on December 31/1988

Before I proceed further, I should mention that because of an earlier observation by Robin Hansen, a new element has been added into the computational lexicon: "moose." A moose is an inadequately addressed design issue that is potentially very large and very nasty. It could be thought of as a metabug, as it is a problem that exists before code is even written, and could therefore produce bugs (or spoilage) if unresolved. The origin of this term comes from a design meeting where Robin accepted the task of logging issues that had been swept under the rug. At one point he made a comment to the effect that, "it looks like you've swept a whole moose under there." In the Xanadu design effort, this term has proved invaluable--the language, however, may never be the same. --JohnDougan?