crock

[American scatologism "crock of shit"] 1. An awkward feature

or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For

example, using small integers to represent error codes without

the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example,

Unix "make(1)", which returns code 139 for a process that dies

due to segfault).

2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone

to failure if disturbed in the least. For example, a

too-clever programmer might write an assembler which mapped

instruction mnemonics to numeric opcodes

algorithmically, a trick which depends far too intimately on

the particular bit patterns of the opcodes. (For another

example of programming with a dependence on actual opcode

values, see The Story of Mel.) Many crocks have a tightly

woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See kluge,

brittle. The adjectives "crockish" and "crocky", and the

nouns "crockishness" and "crockitude", are also used.

[Jargon File]