18 lines
980 B
Plaintext
18 lines
980 B
Plaintext
crock
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n. [from the American scatologism crock of shit ] 1. An awkward feature or
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programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For example, using
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small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting
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them to the user (as in, for example, Unix make (1) , which returns code 139
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for a process that dies due to segfault ). 2. A technique that works
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acceptably, but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least.
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For example, a too-clever programmer might write an assembler which mapped
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instruction mnemonics to numeric opcodes algorithmically, a trick which
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depends far too intimately on the particular bit patterns of the opcodes.
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(For another example of programming with a dependence on actual opcode
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values, see The Story of Mel' in Appendix A.) Many crocks have a tightly
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woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See kluge , brittle. The
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adjectives crockish and crocky , and the nouns crockishness and crockitude ,
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are also used.
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