further down the rabbit hole

a simple curio, I found this while swimming around in the deep end of some sample code I’m tinkering with, trying to track down a memory leak. as I somewhat surmised, its an old timey programmer idiom for freed memory.  I found some interesting syntaxes for the same thing on wikipedia, including 0xDEADFOOD, 0xBADCAFE, and 0xDEADBABE.  Here is the magic number wikipedia page.