PIC

PIC or pic can refer to:

Government and politics

Law and policy

Medicine and biochemistry

Pic (novel)

Pic is a novella by Jack Kerouac, first published in 1971.

Pic is the story of a small child, Pictorial Review Jackson, from North Carolina. When his grandfather, with whom he lives, dies, his older brother appears and plucks him from the dysfunctional home of his aunt. They journey north to New York City, where Pic bears witness to the economic 'hard times' his brother is experiencing. After losing not one, but two jobs in one day, his brother sends his pregnant girlfriend to live with her sister in San Francisco, as the two boys try to hitch and bum their way across the country.

It is written in a voice that is stereotypically black.

It is out of print and currently available only as a single volume with either of Kerouac's novels Satori in Paris and The Subterraneans.

References

Pic language

In computing, Pic is a domain-specific programming language by Brian Kernighan for specifying diagrams in terms of objects such as boxes with arrows between them. The pic compiler translates this description into concrete drawing commands. Pic is a procedural programming language, with variable assignment, macros, conditionals, and looping. The language is an example of a little language originally intended for the comfort of non-programmers in the Unix environment (Bentley 1988).

Pic was first implemented, and is still most typically used, as a preprocessor in the troff document processing system. The pic preprocessor filters a troff document, replacing diagram descriptions by concrete drawing commands, and passing the rest of the document through without change.

A version of pic is included in groff, the GNU version of troff. GNU pic can also act as a preprocessor for TeX documents, emitting its own tpic DVI specials, which unfortunately aren't as widely supported as those of other TeX drivers (like PostScript). Arbitrary diagram text can be included for formatting by the word processor to which the pic output is directed, and arbitrary post-processor commands can also be included. Dwight Aplevich's implementation, DPIC, can also generate postscript or svg images by itself, as well as act as a preprocessor. The three principal sources of pic processors are GNU pic, found on many Linux systems, and dpic, both of which are free, and the original AT&T pic.