flat
adj. 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That
bitty box has only a flat filesystem, not a hierarchical
one." The verb form is
flatten. 2. Said of a memory
architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear
address space (typically with each possible value of a processor
register corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a
`segmented' architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which
addresses are composed from a base-register/offset pair (segmented
designs are generally considered
cretinous).
Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually
used pejoratively, while sense 2 is a
Good Thing.
