Fandango on core
<jargon, programming> (Unix/C, from the Mexican dance) In
C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a
core dump, or corrupts the
malloc arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have "done a fandango on core".
On low-end personal machines without an
MMU, this can corrupt the
operating system itself, causing massive lossage.
Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted.
See
aliasing bug,
precedence lossage,
smash the stack,
memory leak,
memory smash,
overrun screw,
core.
[
Jargon File]
