rock

n 1: a lump of hard consolidated mineral matter; "he threw a rock

at me" [syn: {stone}]

2: material consisting of the aggregate of minerals like those

making up the Earth's crust [syn: {stone}]

3: hard stick bright-colored stick candy typically peppermint

flavored [syn: {rock candy}]

4: a type of dance music originating in the 1950s; a blend of

rhythm-and-blues with country-and-western [syn: {rock 'n'

roll}, {rock and roll}, {rock music}]

5: pitching dangerously to one side [syn: {careen}, {sway}, {tilt}]

v 1: move back and forth, like a ship [syn: {sway}, {shake}]

2: rock or place in or as if in a cradle; "He cradled the

infant in his arms" [syn: {cradle}]

crock

[American scatologism "crock of shit"] 1. An awkward feature

or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For

example, using small integers to represent error codes without

the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example,

Unix "make(1)", which returns code 139 for a process that dies

due to {segfault}).

2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone

to failure if disturbed in the least. For example, a

too-clever programmer might write an assembler which mapped

{instruction mnemonics} to numeric {opcode}s

{algorithm}ically, a trick which depends far too intimately on

the particular bit patterns of the opcodes. (For another

example of programming with a dependence on actual opcode

values, see {The Story of Mel}.) Many crocks have a tightly

woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See {kluge},

{brittle}. The adjectives "crockish" and "crocky", and the

nouns "crockishness" and "crockitude", are also used.

[{Jargon File}]