According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of {NeWS}, {GOSMACS}
and Java), to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it
works." (See {whacker}.) It is actually possible to do this in
nontrivial circumstances if the change is small and well-defined and
you are very good at {glark}ing things from context. As a trivial
example, it is relatively easy to change all stderr writes to stdout
writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise
mysterious.
[glossary]