- Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, meteoroids, asteroids, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole.
- Why did x86 support self-modifying code in the 80s and 90s? (stackexchange.com)
On the simplest microprocessors, self-modifying code is not a special problem. On an 8080, you can write just ahead of the instruction pointer, and a few clock cycles later, the instruction you just wrote, will be fetched and executed as though it had been there all along. But as pipelines and instruction cache are introduced, this becomes more problematic.