crunch

crunch 1. vi.  To process, usually in a time-consuming or
   complicated way.  Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is
   nonetheless painful to perform.  The pain may be due to the
   triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,000,000.
   "FORTRAN programs do mostly {number-crunching}."  2. vt. To
   reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit
   configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as
   by a Huffman code.  (The file ends up looking something like a
   paper document would if somebody crunched the paper into a wad.)
   Since such compression usually takes more computations than simpler
   methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly
   appropriate.  (This meaning is usually used in the construction
   `file crunch(ing)' to distinguish it from {number-crunching}.)
   See {compress}.  3. n. The character `#'.  Used at XEROX
   and CMU, among other places.  See {{ASCII}}.  4. vt. To squeeze
   program source into a minimum-size representation that will still
   compile or execute.  The term came into being specifically for a
   famous program on the BBC micro that crunched BASIC source in order
   to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so
   the number of characters mattered).  {Obfuscated C Contest}
   entries are often crunched; see the first example under that entry.