punt
(From the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back
15 yards and punt!") 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
run-time system."
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
pumpking « punch card « punched card « punt »
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