recompile the world: The surprisingly large amount of work that
needs to be done as the result of any small but globally visible
program change. "The world" may mean the entirety of some huge
program, or may in theory refer to every program of a certain class
in the entire known universe. For instance, "Add one #define to
stdio.h, and you have to recompile the world." This means that any
minor change to the standard-I/O header file theoretically mandates
recompiling every C program in existence, even if only to verify
that the change didn't screw something else up. In practice, you may
not actually have to recompile the world, but the implication is
that some human cleverness is required to figure out what parts can
be safely left out.
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