Difference between revisions of "138: Pointers"
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Revision as of 17:06, 3 August 2012
Image Text
Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.
Description
This comic is about a play on the dual meaning of the word “pointer”. Cueball is playing a computer game in the comic, but he seems to be stuck. So he askes Black Hat for a few tips (“pointers”) to get unstuck again. Black Hat wants to be annoying, so he spits out a couple of (seemingly random) 32-bit hexadecimal addresses, which are “pointers” in a programming language. These pointers are used to access a certain location in the computer's memory in order to fulfill a task. Cueball then hates Black Hat for not answering his question.
The "segmentation fault" the image text is referencing also arises from this kind of memory access. If you define a pointer to an invalid address, then try to access the memory location associated with it, you could end up with this exception. The hexadecimal address 0x-1 is one of those invalid access pointers, because memory locations generally start at numeric location 0.