1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune ) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible.
2. Aimless small modification to a program, especially for some pointless goal.
3. bit bashing , especially used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
[ Jargon File ]