:peek: n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer
BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute
address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any
{HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much hacking on
small, non-MMU micros consists of `peek'ing around memory, more
or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such
addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list,
the}}). The results of `poke's at these addresses may be highly
useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total
{lossage} (see {killer poke}).
Since a {real operating system} provides useful, higher-level
services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on
micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is
diagnostic of the {newbie}. (Of course, OS kernels often have to
do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if
unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
indirect through it.)
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
aliasing bug: n. A class of subtle programming errors that can
arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. via
`malloc(3)' or equivalent. If several pointers address
(`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the
storage is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias
and then referenced through another, which may lead to subtle (and
possibly intermittent) lossage depending on the state and the
allocation history of the malloc {arena}....
