Just as “FF” is likely to represent the maximum of a given variable type, dead beef is a test value designation, a play on letters. The letters of the hexadecimal number system are a, b, c, d, e, f. #dead_beef contains all of them except c, so it is helpful for testing. The Windows calculator, switched to programmer mode, is very helpful for hex-dec-bin conversions. From this, it turns out that the value of 16#dead_beef is: