punt
[from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"]
- 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.
- More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the {Right Thing} is and resort to an inefficient hack.
- 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."
- 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 runtime system."
- To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a punter thus, is a person or program that does this.
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