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crock: n. [from the American scatologism crock of
shit] 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' 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.
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