bum: 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space,
often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more
instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the
interrupt code." In 1996, this term and the practice it describes
are semi-obsolete. In elder days, John McCarthy (inventor of
LISP) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his
students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming",
and eventually just "bumming". 2. To squeeze out excess; to remove
something in order to improve whatever it was removed from (without
changing function; this distinguishes the process from a
featurectomy). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or
hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes
the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely
superseded by v. tune (and n. tweak, hack), though none of
these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in
Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English the
noun `bum' is a rude synonym for `buttocks' and the verb `bum' for
buggery.
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