Fandango on Core

[UNIX or C hackers, from the Mexican dance]

n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a core dump, or corrupts the malloc(3) arena in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said to have “done a fandango on core”. On low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted.

See aliasing bug, precedence lossage, smash the stack, memory leak, overrun screw, core.