space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three
more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night
bumming the interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice
it
describes are semi-obsolete. In {elder days}, John McCarthy
(inventor of {LISP}) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed
hackers among his students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization
became "program bumming", and eventually just "bumming". 2. To
squeeze out excess; to remove something in order to improve
whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this
distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. /n./ A small
change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more
efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction
faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by /v./ {tune}
(and /n./ {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly
capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish,
because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym
for `buttocks'.

:bump: /vt./ Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as
C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and
index dummies in `for', `while', and `do-while'
loops.

:burble: /v./ [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] Like
{flame}, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and
ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep
contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he
got a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault."
This is mainstream slang in some parts of England.