May 15, 2003

wart

n.

A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an otherwise clean design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of csh1, single quotes literalize every character inside them except !. In ANSI C, the ?? syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also miswart.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:23 AM

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