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more about crunch
crunch |
5 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Crunch \Crunch\ (kr[u^]nch), v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Crunched} (kr[u^]ncht); p. pr & vb n. {Crunching}.] [Prob. of imitative origin; or cf D. schransen to eat heartily, or E. scrunch.] 1. To chew with force and noise; to craunch. And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull. --Byron. 2. To grind or press with violence and noise. The ship crunched through the ice. --Kane. 3. To emit a grinding or craunching noise. The crunching and ratting of the loose stones. --H. James. From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Crunch \Crunch\, v. t. To crush with the teeth; to chew with a grinding noise; to craunch; as to crunch a biscuit. From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: 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}] From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]: crunch 1. vi 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. vt To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking something like a paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.) 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 crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.) See {compress}. 3. n. The character `#'. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See {{ASCII}}. 4. vt 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. From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: 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}]
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