(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 used to consist of peeking 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
circulated. The results of pokes 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 kernel hacker would unhesitatingly,
if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and
indirect through it.)
