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.
[The Jargon File]
(1994-12-16)