Hal: see Halle Halle (häl`ə), Fr. Hal, commune (1991 pop. 32,758), Flemish Brabant prov., central Belgium, on the Charleroi-Brussels Canal.
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hal

In Sufism, a state of mind reached from time to time by mystics during their journey toward God. The ahwal (plural of hal) are God-given graces that appear when a soul is purified of its attachments to the material world. Unlike maqams, which are based on merit, ahwal cannot be acquired or retained through an individual's own efforts; the Sufi can only wait patiently for their arrival, which fills him with spiritual joy and renews his desire to seek God. The ahwal most often referred to are those of watching, nearness, ecstasy, intoxication, sobriety, and intimacy.

(1) (Hardware Abstraction Layer) An interface between the hardware and the software. An operating system is essentially a hardware abstraction layer; however, a HAL implies an additional layer between the OS and the hardware. It is used to enable the operating system to be ported to new hardware platforms by writing a new abstraction layer. In practice, parts of the kernel may always have to be optimized in order to support new hardware as efficiently as possible.

An abstraction layer was built into Windows NT and its 2000 and XP offspring. The Windows DirectX APIs call the HAL layer directly.

(2) (Heuristic/ALgorithmic) The name of the computer in Stanley Kubrick's famous film "2001," which takes over command of the spaceship. Each of the letters in H-A-L precede the letters I-B-M. In 1968, when the movie was released, IBM controlled almost every aspect of the computer business; however, the IBM name connection was supposedly a coincidence.

1.	(computer)	HAL - HAL 9000, the murdering computer on the spaceship in the science fiction classic "2001, A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C. Clark. "HAL" is "IBM" with each letter changed to the one before and there is an unconfirmed rumour that 9000 is the sum of the various IBM computer numbers that were in service at the time. However, in the sequel "2010", Clarke emphatically denies that HAL's name is supposed to be "one step ahead of IBM". It is, rather, short for "heuristic algorithm".
2.	(operating system)	HAL - Hardware Abstraction Layer.