fandango on core
<jargon, programming> (Unix/C, from the Mexican dance) In C, a wild
pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the malloc
arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said
to have "done a fandango on core". On low-end personal machines without an MMU,
this can corrupt the operating system itself, causing massive lossage. Other
frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted.
See aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack, memory leak, memory
smash, overrun screw, core.
[Jargon File]
(1994-12-16)
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