4 ms·
> It is neither a necessary nor sufficient pre-condition for knowledge of memory debugging techniques and it probably has about as much correlation with them as
by strlen 16y ago
> It is neither a necessary nor sufficient pre-condition for knowledge of memory debugging techniques and it probably has about as much correlation with them as asking whether they have read The Lord of the Rings.
It's a hexadecimal number, that should be quite obvious. It's a noteable and easy to notice one. Others may have used a different one (I used 0x12341234 for the task as others have used 0xdeadbeef) but it should be obviously what you'd use it for.
Is it one of the better questions? No. Is it merely a shibboleth or a piece of trivia? When asked to low-level hackers, no.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoWhen shorn of hexadecimal connotation as in the original question what value is there to it? If I ask someone verbally "what is the significance of dead beef" should I put any value in their either having already learned about 0xDEADBEEF or in their ability to appreciate that it could be a 32-bit word aligned hex value? If someone were to change the question to "what is the significance of bad food?" would it be considered equally valuable?
- strlen 16y agoO is not a hexadecimal number - even if it was "BAD F00D" it still wouldn't be a full 32-bit word - it's also not use by existing libraries (libgmalloc) cafe babe, dada dada would just as well as dead beef In short, either you are familiar with magic numbers or you're not. If you're not, you're certainly not qualified to work on anything really low-level and may not be qualified to do C/C++ development in userland either (without strong evidence to the contrary).