18 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
18 lines
1.1 KiB
Plaintext
peek
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n.,vt. (and poke ) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly
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accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the
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corresponding constructs in any HLL (peek reads memory, poke modifies it).
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Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros used to consist of peek ing around
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memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
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interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for
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various computers circulated. The results of pokes at these addresses may
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be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total
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lossage (see killer poke ). Since a real operating system provides useful,
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higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes
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on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
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groveling, a question like How do I do a peek in C? is diagnostic of the
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newbie. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do exactly this; a real kernel
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hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a
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pointer variable and indirect through it.
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