whim

n 1: a sudden desire; "he bought it on impulse" [syn: {caprice},

{impulse}, {vagary}]

2: a whimsical idea; "the theatrical notion of disguise is

associated with disaster in his stories" [syn: {notion}, {whimsy},

{whimsey}]

shim

A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired

memory alignment or other addressing property. For example,

the {PDP-11} {Unix} {linker}, in split I&D (instructions and

data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data

space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be

confused with the {C} null pointer).

See also {loose bytes}.

[{Jargon File}]

(1994-12-21)