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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. "