crock
[from the American scatologism `crock of shit'] n. 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, a Real Programmer in Appendix A.) 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.
