(Unix/C, from the Mexican dance) In
C,
a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a
core dump,
or corrupts the
malloc arena in such a way as to cause
mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have "done
a fandango on core". On low-end personal machines without an
MMU, this can corrupt the
operating system itself, causing
massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba,
cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted.
See
aliasing bug,
precedence lossage,
smash the stack,
memory leak,
memory smash,
overrun screw,
core.