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The term magic number or magic constant refers to the anti-pattern of using numbers directly in source code. This has been referred to as breaking one of the oldest rules of programming, dating back to the COBOL , FORTRAN and PL/1 manuals of the 1960s. [ 1 ]
It is also used by Mach-O to identify Universal object files, and by the Java programming language to identify Java bytecode class files. It was originally created by NeXTSTEP developers as a reference to the baristas at Peet's Coffee & Tea. [4] 0xCAFED00D: 3405697037 ("cafe dude") is used by Java as a magic number for their pack200 compression ...
A Java class file is a file (with the .class filename extension) containing Java bytecode that can be executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).A Java class file is usually produced by a Java compiler from Java programming language source files (.java files) containing Java classes (alternatively, other JVM languages can also be used to create class files).
Such signatures are also known as magic numbers or magic bytes. Many file formats are not intended to be read as text. If such a file is accidentally viewed as a text file, its contents will be unintelligible. However, some file signatures can be recognizable when interpreted as text.
For example, when testing a program that takes a user's personal details and verifies their credit card number, a developer may decide to add a magic string shortcut whereby entering the unlikely input of "***" as a credit card number would cause the program to automatically proceed as if the card were valid, without spending time verifying it.
The byte-order mark (BOM) is a particular usage of the special Unicode character code, U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE, whose appearance as a magic number at the start of a text stream can signal several things to a program reading the text: [1] the byte order, or endianness, of the text stream in the cases of 16-bit and 32-bit encodings;
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0xDEADBEEF, a hexadecimal number used in various software operating systems as a magic number; DeaDBeeF, an audio player program This page was last edited on 23 ...