A
cardinal number, in computing terms, is a term that's sometimes used to refer to a fixed condition - in other words, you might call a function with one parameter should of the usual number, and the final value will be assigned a cardinal number that can't occur there in reality. For example, you might call a function into which you input the number of children a person has, and if no value is entered the value could be set to a cardinal 999 that's checked for by the code. Should work, shouldn't it? After all - no-one could have 999 children.
And it would work fine until the local headmaster, with a role of 1 short of 100 students, runs it on his hordes
A
magic number is formed of certain bytes at the start of a file which signify the content type in the file. For example, the first three bytes of a .gif image file are GIF. The Unix and Linux
file command uses magic numbers to identify content type.
(written 2006-12-14, updated 2006-12-21)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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