trap
1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some
exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS
performs some action, then returns control to the program. 2. vi.
To cause a trap. "These instructions trap to the monitor." Also
used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor
traps all input/output instructions."
This term is associated with assembler programming
(`interrupt' or `exception' is more common among HLL programmers) and appears to be fading into
history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to
shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and
systems hackers (see system, sense
1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable
exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O
interrupts).