English Dictionary: dative bond | by the DICT Development Group |
From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]: | |
DEADBEEF /ded-beef/ n. The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. Some modern debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a way of converting {heisenbug}s into {Bohr bug}s. As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you start from an odd half-word boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote under {fool}. | |
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
DEADBEEF used to fill words of freshly allocated memory under a number of {IBM} environments including the {RS/6000}; equal to decimal 3,735,928,559 (unsigned) or -559,038,737 (32-bit signed). As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory). (1998-06-29) |