dike

vt. To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer
or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is When in doubt, dike it
out. (The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack
software problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it.) The word
dikes is widely used to mean diagonal cutters , a kind of wire cutter. To
dike something out means to use such cutters to remove something. Indeed,
the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as to attack with dikes. Among hackers this
term has been metaphorically extended to informational objects such as
sections of code.

