snap

n 1: the act of catching an object with the hands; "Mays made the

catch with his back to the plate" [syn: {catch}, {grab},

{snatch}]

2: any activity that is easy to do; "marketing this product

will be no picnic" [syn: {cinch}, {picnic}, {duck soup}, {child's

play}, {pushover}, {walkover}, {piece of cake}]

3: (football) putting the ball in play by passing it (between

the legs) to a back [syn: {centering}]

v 1: utter in an angry, sharp, or abrupt tone; `"No!," she

snapped'; "The guard snarled at us" [syn: {snarl}]

2: separate or cause to separate abruptly; "The rope snapped";

"tear the paper" [syn: {tear}, {rupture}, {bust}]

3: break suddenly and abruptly; as of something under tension;

"The rope snapped" [syn: {crack}]

4: move or strike with a click; "then the brightness as he

clicked on the light." [syn: {click}]

5: snap close with a sound; "The lock snapped shut"

6: as of tightly stretched ropes or fingers [syn: {crack}]

7: move with a snapping sound; "bullets snapped past us"

8: to grasp hastily or eagerly; "Before I could stop him the

dog snatched the ham bone" [syn: {snatch}, {snatch up}]

9: put in play with a snap, of a football

10: cause to make a snapping sound; of fingers [syn: {click}, {flick}]

11: record on photographic film"I photographed the scene of the

accident" [syn: {photograph}, {shoot}]

SNAP

1. Early (IBM 360?) interpreted text-processing language for

beginners, close to basic English. ["Computer Programming in

English", M.P. Barnett, Harcourt Brace 1969].

2. ["Some Proposals for SNAP, A Language with Formal Macro

Facilities", R.B. Napper, Computer J 10(3):231-243 (1967)].

[same as 1?]

3. To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to

replace an old address with the forwarding address found

there. If you telephone the main number for an institution

and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell

you that person's extension before connecting you, in the

hopes that you will "snap your pointer" and dial direct next

time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band

stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you

remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a

straight line from first to last. See {chase pointers}.

Often, the behaviour of a {trampoline} is to perform an error

check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as

henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error

check). In this context one also speaks of "snapping links".

For example, in a {Lisp} implementation, a function interface

trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing

the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller

and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link

allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call

instruction with no further overhead.

[{Jargon File}]