1. Early (IBM 360?) interpreted text-processing language for
beginners, close to basic English. ["Computer Programming in
English", M.P. Barnett, Harcourt Brace 1969].
2. ["Some Proposals for SNAP, A Language with Formal Macro
Facilities", R.B. Napper, Computer J 10(3):231-243 (1967)].
[same as 1?]
3. To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to
replace an old address with the forwarding address found
there. If you telephone the main number for an institution
and ask for a particular person by name, the operator may tell
you that person's extension before connecting you, in the
hopes that you will "snap your pointer" and dial direct next
time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band
stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you
remove all the thumbtacks in the middle, it snaps into a
Often, the behaviour of a
trampoline is to perform an error
check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as
henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error
check). In this context one also speaks of "snapping links".
For example, in a
Lisp implementation, a function interface
trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing
the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller
and the callee are both compiled, then snapping the link
allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call
instruction with no further overhead.