[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 runtime system." 5. To knock someone off
an Internet or chat connection; a `punter' thus, is a person or
program that does this.
