crunch
(jargon)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."
crunch
(compression)To reduce the size of a file without losing
information by a complicated scheme that produces bit
configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such
as by a Huffman code. 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 crunching"
to distinguish it from
number crunching.) Use of
crunch
itself in this sense is rare among
Unix hackers.
crunch
(3)crunch
(4)To squeeze program source to the minimum size that will
still compile or execute. The term came from a
BBC Microcomputer program that crunched BBC BASIC
source in
order to make it run more quickly (apart from storing
keywords as byte codes, the language was wholly interpreted,
so the number of characters mattered).
Obfuscated C Contest
entries are often crunched; see the first example under that
entry.
This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)