punt

(From the punch line of an old joke referring to American

football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!") 1. To give up,

typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the

movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this

feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've

decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not

ever even going to put in the feature.

2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the

Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack.

3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically

because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well

to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the

right form to dump the graph in is - we'll punt that for

now."

4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other

section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to

do that; let's punt to the run-time system."

[Jargon File]