crunch

1. jargon 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 numbercrunching."

2. compression To reduce the size of a file without losing

information by a complicated scheme that produces bit

configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such

as by a Huffman code. 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 crunching"

to distinguish it from number crunching.) Use of crunch

itself in this sense is rare among Unix hackers.

3. The hash character. Used at XEROX and CMU, among

other places.

4. To squeeze program source to the minimum size that will

still compile or execute. The term came from a BBCMicrocomputer program that crunched BBC BASIC source in

order to make it run more quickly (apart from storing

keywords as byte codes, the language was wholly interpreted,

so the number of characters mattered). Obfuscated C Contest

entries are often crunched; see the first example under that

entry.

[Jargon File]

(2002-03-14)