What is "gist"

Gist \Gist\, n. [OF. giste abode, lodgings, F. g[^i]te, fr. g['e]sir to lie, L. jac?re, prop., to be thrown, hence, to lie, fr. jac?re to throw. In the second sense fr. OF. gist, F. g[^i]t, 3d pers. sing. ind. of g['e]sir to lie, used in a proverb, F., c'est l[`a] que g[^i]t le li[`e]vre, it is there that the hare lies, i. e., that is the point, the difficulty. See Jet a shooting forth, and cf. Agist, Joist, n., Gest a stage in traveling.]

1. A resting place. [Obs.]

   These quails have their set gists; to wit, ordinary resting and baiting places.
   --Holland.

2. The main point, as of a question; the point on which an action rests; the pith of a matter; as, the gist of a question.

1711, "the real point" (of a law case, etc.), from Anglo-French legalese phrases such as cest action gist "this action lies," meaning "this case is sustainable by law," from Old French gist en "it consists in, it lies in" (third person singular present indicative of gésir "to lie"), from Latin iacet "it lies," from iacere "to lie, rest," related to iacere "to throw" (see jet (v.)). Extended sense of "essence" first recorded 1823.

n. 1 The most essential part; the main idea or substance (of a longer or more complicated matter); the crux of a matter 2 (context legal dated English) The essential ground for action in a suit, without which there is no cause of action. 3 (context obsolete English) Resting place (especially of animals), lodging. vb. To summarize, to extract and present the most important parts of.

1. n. the central meaning or theme of a speech or literary work [syn: effect, essence, burden, core]

2. the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience; "the gist of the prosecutor's argument"; "the heart and soul of the Republican Party"; "the nub of the story" [syn: kernel, substance, core, center, essence, heart, heart and soul, inwardness, marrow, meat, nub, pith, sum, nitty-gritty]

In computing, Gist is a scientific graphics library written in C by David H. Munro of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It supports three graphics output devices: X Window, PostScript, and Computer Graphics Metafiles (CGM). The library is promoted as being small (writing directly to Xlib), efficient, and full-featured. Portability is restricted to systems running X Window (essentially the Unix world).

There is a Python port called PyGist; it is used as one of several optional graphics front-ends of the scientific library SciPy. PyGist is also ported to Mac and MS Windows.

Category:Unix programming tools Category:Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

In computing, GiST or Generalized Search Tree, is a data structure and API that can be used to build a variety of disk-based search trees. GiST is a generalization of the B+ tree, providing a concurrent and recoverable height-balanced search tree infrastructure without making any assumptions about the type of data being stored, or the queries being serviced. GiST can be used to easily implement a range of well-known indexes, including B+ trees, R-trees, hB-trees, RD-trees, and many others; it also allows for easy development of specialized indexes for new data types. It cannot be used directly to implement non-height-balanced trees such as quad trees or prefix trees (tries), though like prefix trees it does support compression, including lossy compression. GiST can be used for any data type that can be naturally ordered into a hierarchy of supersets. Not only is it extensible in terms of data type support and tree layout, it allows the extension writer to support any query predicates that they choose. The most widely used GiST implementation is in the PostgreSQL relational database; it was also implemented in the Informix Universal Server, and as a standalone library, libgist.

GiST is an example of software extensibility in the context of database systems: it allows the easy evolution of a database system to support new tree-based indexes. It achieves this by factoring out its core system infrastructure from a narrow API that is sufficient to capture the application-specific aspects of a wide variety of index designs. The GiST infrastructure code manages the layout of the index pages on disk, the algorithms for searching indexes and deleting from indexes, and complex transactional details such as page-level locking for high concurrency and write-ahead logging for crash recovery. This allows authors of new tree-based indexes to focus on implementing the novel features of the new index type — for example, the way in which subsets of the data should be described for search — without becoming experts in database system internals.

Although originally designed for answering Boolean selection queries, GiST can also support nearest-neighbor search, and various forms of statistical approximation over large data sets.

The PostgreSQL GiST implementation includes support for variable length keys, composite keys, concurrency control and recovery; these features are inherited by all GiST extensions. There are several contributed modules developed using GiST and distributed with PostgreSQL. For example:

• rtree_gist, btree_gist - GiST implementation of R-Tree and B-Tree
• intarray - index support for one-dimensional array of int4's
• tsearch2 - a searchable (full text) data type with indexed access
• ltree - data types, indexed access methods and queries for data organized as a tree-like structures
• hstore - a storage for (key,value) data
• cube - data type, representing multidimensional cubes

The PostgreSQL GiST implementation provides the indexing support for the PostGIS ( geographic information system) and the BioPostgres bioinformatics system.

Gist is the surname of:

• Carole Gist (born 1969), first African American woman to win the Miss USA title
• Christopher Gist (1706–1759), one of the first white explorers of the Ohio Country in what would become the United States
• Howard B. Gist, Jr. (1919-2011), American attorney
• James Gist (born 1986), American professional basketball player
• Joseph Gist (1775–1836), U.S. Representative from South Carolina
• Kenneth Gist Jr. (born 1946), birth name of Kenny O'Dell, American country music singer and songwriter.
• Mordecai Gist (1743–1792), Continental Army general during the American Revolutionary War
• Nathaniel Gist (1733-1812?), American colonel in the American Revolutionary War, reputed father of the Native American leader Sequoyah, son of Christopher Gist
• Robert Gist (1924–1998), American actor and film director
• Samuel Gist (1717 or 1723-1815), English-born colonial Virginia slave owner who made provisions to free his slaves in his will
• States Rights Gist (1831–1864), lawyer, militia general and Confederate Army general in the American Civil War
• William Henry Gist (1807–1874), 68th Governor of South Carolina and a leader of the secession movement in South Carolina