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)