2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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punt
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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v. [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: Drop
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back 15 yards and punt! ] 1. To give up, typically without any intention of
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retrying. Let's punt the movie tonight. I was going to hack all night to get
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this feature in, but I decided to punt may mean that you've decided not to
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stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in
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the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right
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Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer
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solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable
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sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. No way to know what the
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right form to dump the graph in is we'll punt that for now. 4. To hand a
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tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. It's
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too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system.
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5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a punter thus, is a
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person or program that does this.
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