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crunch 1. vi. To process, usually in a
time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial
operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to
the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000.
“FORTRAN programs do mostly
number-crunching.” 2. vt. To reduce the size of a
file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely
unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends
up looking something like a paper document would if somebody crunched the
paper into a wad.) Since such compression usually takes more computations
than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly
appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction file crunch(ing) to distinguish it from
number-crunching.) See
compress. 3. n. The character
#. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See
ASCII. 4. vt. To squeeze program source
into a minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute. The
term came into being specifically for a famous program on the BBC micro
that crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a
wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered).
Obfuscated C Contest entries are often crunched; see
the first example under that entry.
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