flatten

v 1: make flat or flatter; "flatten a road", "flatten your

stomach with these exercises"

2: become flat or flatter; "The landscape flattened" [syn: {flatten

out}]

3: lower the pitch of (musical notes) [syn: {drop}] [ant: {sharpen}]

flatten

To remove structural information, especially to filter

something with an implicit tree structure into a simple

sequence of leaves; also tends to imply mapping to

{flat ASCII}. "This code flattens an expression with

parentheses into an equivalent {canonical} form."

[{Jargon File}]