punt
[from the punch line of an old joke referring to American
football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] v. 1. To give up,
typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the
movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this
feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided
not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even
going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on
figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an
inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer solving a
problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable
sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to
know what the right form to dump the graph in is --- we'll punt
that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off
to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the
compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system."
