In computer programming, initialization (or initialisation) is the assignment of an initial value for a data object or variable. The manner in which initialization is performed depends on the programming language, as well as the type, storage class, etc.

The Platform Initialization Specification (PI Specification) is a specification published by the Unified EFI Forum that describes the internal interfaces between different parts of computer platform firmware. This allows for more interoperability between firmware components from different sources.

<algorithm> (Or "message digest function") A {one-way function} which takes a variable-length message and produces a fixed-length hash. Given the hash it is computationally infeasible to find a message with that hash; in fact one can't determine any usable information about a message with that hash, not even a single bit. For some one-way hash functions it's also computationally impossible to determine two messages which produce the same hash. A one-way hash function can be private or public, just like an encryption function. MD5, SHA and Snefru are examples of public one-way hash functions. A public one-way hash function can be used to speed up a public-key digital signature system. Rather than sign a long message, which can take a long time, compute the one-way hash of the message, and sign the hash. {sci.crypt FAQ (ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/usenet-by-group/sci.crypt/)}. (2001-05-10)