crunch

n 1: the sound of something crunching; "he heard the crunch of

footsteps on the gravel path"

2: the act of crushing [syn: {crush}, {compaction}]

v 1: make crunching noises; "his shoes wre crunching on the

gravel" [syn: {scranch}, {scraunch}, {crackle}]

2: make a crunching noise, as of an engine lacking lubricants

[syn: {crump}, {thud}, {scrunch}]

3: press or grind with a crunching noise [syn: {cranch}, {craunch},

{grind}]

4: chew noisily; "The chidren crunched the celery sticks" [syn:

{munch}]

5: reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading;

"grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic" [syn: {grind},

{mash}, {bray}, {comminute}]

crunch

1. 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}."

2. 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.

3. The hash character "#" ({ASCII} 35). Used at {XEROX} and

{CMU}, among other places.

4. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size

representation that will still compile or execute. The term

came into being specifically for a famous program on the BBC

micro that crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more

quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of

characters mattered). {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are

often crunched; see the first example under that entry.

[{Jargon File}]