trap

1. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some

exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the

OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.

2. To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor."

Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap.

"The monitor traps all input/output instructions."

This term is associated with assembler programming

("interrupt" or "exception" is more common among HLL

programmers) and appears to be fading into history among

programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink.

However, it is still important to computer architects and

systems hackers (see system, sense 1), who use it to

distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from

timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).

[Jargon File]