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Wart

A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design.

Something conspicuous for localised ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule.

For example, in some versions of "csh(1)", single quotes literalise every character inside them except "!".

In ANSI C, the "?" syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart.

See also miswart.

[Jargon File]

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WarGames warlording warm boot Warm Silence Software Warp	16-bit application Adamakegen assignment problem Bletchley Park Digital Signal Processing Language	washing machine Wasserman WATBOL Watcom C/C++ Watcom International