(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
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 run-time system."