shim: n. A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a
desired memory alignment or other addressing property. For example,
the PDP-11 Unix linker, in split I&D (instructions and data) mode,
inserts a two-byte shim at location 0 in data space so that no data
object will have an address of 0 (and be confused with the C null
pointer). See also loose bytes.
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