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.)
