main line
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main line
1. Railways
a. the trunk route between two points, usually fed by branch lines
b. (as modifier): a main-line station
2. US a main road
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Main Line
(Russian, magistral’; from Latin magistralis, “leading”).
(1) The main route, the primary line in communications (railroad main line, waterway main line).
(2) A wide and heavily traveled street in a large city.
(3) The main cable or wire in an electrical circuit or in tele-graph and telephone communications.
(4) The main pipe in a sewerage line or water system.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
main loop
The primary logic in a program. A program is essentially an input-process-output architecture, and everything happens when there is an input, such as a mouse click, mouse movement, keyboard depression or an arriving network packet. The main loop takes care of this by continually testing for these inputs and calling the appropriate routines to process them. See loop and event loop.Copyright © 1981-2019 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.