fandango on core


[UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' 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 OS 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.