nonrunnable

Nonrunnable is an informal adjective used in software engineering and digital contexts to describe a file, script, program, or artifact that cannot be executed or run under a given set of conditions. The term emphasizes the state of being non-operational in terms of execution, rather than being merely incorrect or incomplete. It is commonly found in repositories, documentation, and issue trackers to distinguish runnable components from those that will not execute as-is.

Causes include missing interpreters or runtimes, compile-time or link-time failures, platform or architecture mismatches, dependency issues, incomplete build configurations, or intentional design choices such as artifacts that require user interaction or external data. Nonrunnable artifacts may still be valuable for reading, reference, or demonstration but are not directly executable.

Practices: developers may annotate files as nonrunnable, provide notes about why, and offer runnable alternatives or instructions to make them runnable. In testing, a nonrunnable test case may be skipped due to unmet prerequisites. In documentation, example code may be framed as pseudo-code or shown for illustration rather than execution.

Relation to other terms: nonrunnable is closely related to non-executable or not runnable, but usage varies by organization. It differs from components that are conceptually complete but contain intentionally included errors; those are usually described as failing or invalid rather than nonrunnable.

Examples include legacy scripts written for deprecated interpreters (e.g., Python 2) that fail on current interpreters, binaries built for one OS/architecture on another, or data-driven demos that require a running environment that is not provided.