trampoline

An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and

program-overlay implementations (e.g. on the Macintosh), that

involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and,

likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection

between code sections. These pieces of live data are called

"trampolines". Trampolines are notoriously difficult to

understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use

this term that the trampoline that doesn't bend your brain is

not the true trampoline. See also snap.

[Jargon File]

(2003-03-26)