punt v.
[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
runtime system." 5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat
connection; a `punter' thus, is a person or program that does
this.
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Purple Book n.
1. The "System V Interface Definition". The covers of the
first editions were an amazingly nauseating shade of
off-lavender. 2. Syn. Wizard
Book. Donald Lewine's "POSIX Programmer's Guide"
(O'Reilly, 1991, ISBN 0-937175-73-0). See also book titles.