Mung is
computer jargon
Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...
for a series of potentially destructive or irrevocable changes to a piece of data or a file.
It is sometimes used for vague data transformation steps that are not yet clear to the speaker.
Common munging operations include removing punctuation or HTML tags, data parsing, filtering, and transformation.
The term was coined in 1958 in the
Tech Model Railroad Club at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
.
In 1960 the
backronym
A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...
"Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and by 1976 it was revised to "Mung Until No Good", making it one of the first
recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hof ...
s.
It lived on as a recursive command in the editing language
TECO.
It differs from the very similar term
munge, because munging usually implies destruction of data, while mungeing usually implies modifying data (simple passwords) in order to create protection related to that data.
Munging may also describe the constructive operation of tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate (also called 'duct-taping'). Munging can also describe the processing or filtering of raw data into another form.
As the "no good" part of the acronym implies, munging often involves irrevocable destruction of data.
Hence in the early text-adventure game ''
Zork
''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded ...
'', the user could ''mung'' an object and thereby destroy it, making it impossible to finish the game if the object was an important item.
See also
*
Jargon File
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANE ...
– a glossary of hacker slang.
*
Slug – an application of munging for creating human-friendly
URL
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
s.
*
Kludge
A kludge or kluge () is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet sl ...
– a neologism developed near this time with a similar meaning
References
External links
{{wiktionary, mung, munge
Jargon File entryMungan
mungeat
FOLDOC
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable, encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects.
History
FOLDOC was founded in 1985 by Denis Howe and was hosted by Imperial College London. In May 2015, the site was ...
Email address munging is considered harmful
Computer jargon