shin

n 1: the front part of the human leg between the knee and the

ankle

2: a cut of meat from the lower part of the leg

3: the 22nd letter of the Hebrew alphabet

4: the inner and thicker of the two bones of the human leg

between the knee and ankle [syn: {tibia}, {shinbone}]

v : climb awkwardly, as if by scrambling [syn: {clamber}, {scramble},

{shinny}, {skin}, {struggle}, {sputter}]

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)