featurectomy

/fee"ch*r-ek"t*-mee/ The act of removing a feature from a

program. Featurectomies come in two flavours, the "righteous"

and the "reluctant". Righteous featurectomies are performed

because the remover believes the program would be more elegant

without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and

better way to achieve the same end. (Doing so is not quite

the same thing as removing a misfeature.) Reluctant

featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external

constraint such as code size or execution speed.

[Jargon File]

(1994-10-20)