whack

v. According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of NeWS , GOSMACS and
Java), to. ..modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works. (See
whacker. ) It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if
the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at glark ing
things from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy to change
all stderr writes to stdout writes in a piece of C filter code which remains
otherwise mysterious.