15 Mar
2007
15 Mar
'07
5:01 p.m.
On 15 Mar 2007 at 16:05, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
It's hex. It's one of the "usual"
hex patterns that "spell" out words
using only 0-9 and a-f. Here are a couple of others that I've seen &
used in projects: 0xdeadbeef, 0xc0edbabe. There are others, but I
don't have them off the top of my head.
Bored programmers. On the CDC STAR, we had DEAD codes for system
crashes. IIRC, DEADBEEF was the panic code for the pager faulting
for a non-resident page (The pager can't page itself, so this was a
"you can't get here from there" type of error).
64 bit hex does give you more than octal. We had DEADCACA,
DEADFACE, etc. Some idiot used C0CAC01A as his "magic number").
This would be about 1972-73 on a 64-bit supercomputer. Is there a
DEADBEEF that precedes this?
When someone asks me "why use hex and not octal?", my response
generally is "Because you can spell really stupid things with hex".
Cheers,
Chuck