The great Verity Stob (unfortunately, in an article which no longer seems to be online, after the Dr Dobbs Journal website finally went away) referred to this behaviour (by _human_ programmers) as "nailing the corpse in an upright position".
This is her quoting the original article, but as far as I can see the original article is lost to the mists of time. Might be on archive.org, I suppose.
