crunch

1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes
an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The
pain may be due to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to
1,000,000,000. FORTRAN programs do mostly number- ing. 2. vt. To reduce the
size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations
completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The
file ends up looking something like a paper document would if somebody ed
the paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more
computations than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is
doubly appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction file
(ing) to distinguish it from number- ing. ) See compress. 3. n. The
character #. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See ASCII. 4. vt. To
squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation that will still
compile or execute. The term came into being specifically for a famous
program on the BBC micro that ed BASIC source in order to make it run more
quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters
mattered). Obfuscated C Contest entries are often ed; see the first example
under that entry.

