The command in most microcomputer BASICs for reading memory contents (a byte) at an absolute address. POKE is the corresponding command to write a value to an absolute address. This is often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any High Level Language. Much hacking on small microcomputers without MMUs consists of "peek"ing around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see interrupt list). The results of "poke"s at these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or total lossage (see {killer poke}). Since a real operating system provides useful, higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek in C?" is diagnostic of the newbie. Of course, operating system kernels often have to do exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a pointer variable and indirect through it. [Jargon File] (1995-01-31)

(peeks, peeking, peeked)

Partners Early Experience Kit (Reference: Taligent)

In computer science, peek is an operation on certain abstract data types, specifically sequential collections such as stacks and queues, which returns the value of the top ("front") of the collection without removing the element from the collection. It thus returns the same value as operations such as "pop" or "dequeue", but does not modify the data.

Sir Cuthbert Edgar Peek, 2nd Baronet (30 January 1855 – 6 July 1901) was an astronomer and meteorologist, and took part in activities of several learned societies.

In computing, PEEK and POKE are commands used in some high-level programming languages for accessing the contents of a specific memory cell referenced by its memory address. PEEK gets the byte located at the specified memory address.

Sven Peek, best known as Bobby Peek, is an environmentalist and activist from Durban, South Africa. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1998, for his efforts on improvement of pollution problems in the region of South Durban.