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