hand-hacking

1. The practice of translating a hot spot of a program in a

HLL into hand-tuned assembly language, as opposed to

trying to coerce the compiler into generating better code.

Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon.

See tune, bum, by hand; synonym with cruft.

2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data

sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility

and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed

to be read or modified by humans.

[Jargon File]

(1995-02-16)