ABI

A character from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Abi was the daughter of Zechariah, the wife of Ahaz of Judah and the mother of Hezekiah.

Application Binary Interface

A specific standard for the low-level coding of the parts of programs that interface external objects. Typically a compiler will follow an ABI in generating call sequences and return sequences (at least for extern functions), for performing system calls (an important special case of calling external functions), for the layout of pointers, and possibly for alignment and stack usage and layout of the stack frame.

The ABI is standard; you can only link together object files that follow the same ABI, or chaos will ensue (usually the linker will prevent such linking). Some machines (e.g. 64 bit IRIX boxes) can have more than one ABI; you must select the appropriate one yourself.

The PC world called this (or a similar subset) a "memory model" in the days of MS DOS.

Also:

• The American Bankruptcy Institute
• The Association of British Insurers
• The Association for Biodiversity Information
• The Adaptive Brain Interfaces project
• Acquired Brain Injury
• Associazione Bancaria Italiana
• Associação Brasileira de Imprensa
• Advanced Business Institute

...and the name of several companies, a Japanese cartoon character, and quite a few people who started out being called Abigail.

Considering there are 17,576 TLAs to choose from, it is remarkable how often they are duplicated.

ABI = abiturientti (Finnish) A person studying for the last year in the Finnish equivalent to high school. The last year in high school is actually very fun in Finland, the ABIs get to party a lot.

To the other, younger, students it also seems the ABIs never actually do any studying, since they do most of their studying at home preparing for the final exams and only come to school to do various other things. This is escpecally true in the second half of the school-year.

At least to me this was the best time ive ever had in school, not counting college/university parties of course ;)