Appendix A: Glossary

A-E

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a program component that contains functionality that programmers can use in their own program.

Assembly Code

Assembly is a low-level programming language with simplistic, but few, operations. When assembly code is assembled, the result is machine code. Writing inline assembly routines in C/C++ code often produces a more efficient and faster application; however, the code is harder to maintain, less readable, and sometimes substantially longer.

Big Endian

On a big-endian system, the most significant byte is stored first. SPARC is an example of a big-endian architecture.

Buffer

A buffer is an area of memory allocated with a fixed size. It s commonly used as a temporary holding zone when data is transferred between two devices that are not operating at the same speed or workload. Dynamic buffers are allocated on the heap using malloc. When defining static variables, the buffer is allocated on the stack.

Buffer Overflow

A generic buffer overflow occurs when a buffer has been allocated and more data than expected was copied into it. The two classes of overflows include heap and stack overflows.

Bytecode

Bytecode is program code that is in between the high-level language code understood by humans and machine code read by computers. Bytecode is useful as an intermediate step for languages such as Java, which are platform-independent. Bytecode interpreters for each system interpret bytecode faster than is possible by fully interpreting a high-level language.

C

The C procedural programming language (originally developed...