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appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition. |
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crumb n. Two binary digits; a quad. Larger than a bit, smaller than a nybble. Considered silly. Syn. tayste. General discussion of such terms is under nybble. |
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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-crunching." 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 crunched 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 crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from number-crunching.) 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 crunched 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 crunched; see the first example under that entry. |
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cruncha cruncha cruncha /kruhn'ch kruhn'ch kruhn'ch/ interj. An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a serious grovel. Also describes a notional sound made by groveling hardware. See wugga wugga, grind (sense 3). |
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cryppie /krip'ee/ n. A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware. |
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CTSS /C-T-S-S/ n. Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing operating systems, ancestral to Multics, Unix, and ITS. The name ITS (Incompatible Time-sharing System) was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs. |
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