bum
1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space,
often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more
instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming
the interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice it
describes are semi-obsolete. In elder
days, John McCarthy (inventor of LISP) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed
hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization
became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To
squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve
whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this
distinguishes the process from a featurectomy). 3. n. A small change to an
algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient.
"This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now
uncommon, largely superseded by v. tune (and n. tweak,
hack), though none of these exactly
capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish,
because in the parent dialects of English the noun `bum' is a
rude synonym for `buttocks' and the verb `bum' for buggery.