From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishon the flyon the flya) technical while a computer program is actually running The code is translated on the fly. b) while dealing with a situation, rather than before dealing with it So far, policy is being made on the fly. → fly
Examples from the Corpus
on the fly• Sometimes you have to make decisions on the fly.• This root is then stored and may be accessed in the lexicon at run-time rather than determined on the fly.• Taco Bell: The burritos and fajitas are among the easiest foods to eat on the fly.• Java applets are capable of handling a wide variety of graphic formats as well as creating graphics on the fly.• Lee Ann took all her clothes off and lay down to sun herself on the flying bridge.• Some one more determined could probably find some flat back-road routes, but doing it on the fly proved beyond us.• This time, I got it there on the fly.• Some systems still rely on a batch pagination method while others, like Interleaf, do the whole thing on the fly.• The run-time code is loaded on to a real processor and translated on the fly into the chip's native instruction set. 