Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken!sun-barr!newstop!sun!limes From: limes@sun.com (Greg Limes) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: More secret messages Message-ID: Date: 17 Jan 90 01:33:09 GMT References: <1191@husc6.harvard.edu> <3543@hub.UUCP> <1220@husc6.harvard.edu> <5866@orca.wv.tek.com> <191@jabberwock.shs.ohio-state.edu> <1990Jan16.011712.16993@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <1990Jan16.182005.4336@utzoo.uucp> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Lines: 22 In-reply-to: henry@utzoo.uucp's message of 16 Jan 90 18:20:05 GMT Strange that Sequent uses "FEED FACE DEAD BEEF" ... I used to work with one of their current fine employees (Hi JJB!) back at Culler Scientific (that's another story), and we needed all sorts of these readable patterns during the bringup of the machines. It was no problem to grep through /usr/dict/words to get the list. To this day, the constant 0xDEADBEEF gets sprinkled around my code as initialization values for variables that have no sane initial value. My favorite 64-bit constant -- 0xDEADBEEFFEEDC0ED -- was always hanging around in my diagnostics programs, which left me watching out for things like "-6.259853e+18" and "-1.188596e+148" in the floating point registers. Not sure where we at Culler got these constants, but I suspect that they were probably independently "discovered" at lots of different places over the years. beta1% grep '^[abcdefois]*$' /usr/dict/words -- Greg Limes limes@sun.com ...!sun!limes 73327,2473 CGDB02A [choose one]