trampoline n.
An incredibly hairy technique,
found in some HLL and program-overlay
implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves
on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not,
self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code
sections. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes, trampoline code
is used to transfer control from the kernel back to user mode
when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent to a
process. hese pieces of live
data are called `trampolines'. Trampolines are
notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is
said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn't
bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.