JargonFile/entries/crunch.txt

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. 5. Lowest common denominator intensification of labor
strategy. A phase of (typically though not exclusively) commercial software
development when hackers are threatened by their project managers in order
to work additional unpaid hours to meet some arbitrary deadline decided by
a suit on a golf course. "I won't be at the hackspace tonight because
there's a crunch on at work".