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Does anyone know if there is a citation for the anecdote of using self-mod code as a copy protection technique on the Apple II? I remember reading about it somewhere 20 years ago when I was 'into' the Apple II in high school (back when "20 megabytes" was considered "really in-humanly humungously big" LOL) [[User:Jimw338|Jimw338]] ([[User talk:Jimw338|talk]]) 21:35, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
== Really bad ==
This article is really bad, IMO. It seems to wander around without really declaring a purposeful path through a series of poorly illustrative examples. I'm not sure I truly understand what historically the term "self-modifying code" meant, but this article does little to remedy that. Some examples:
*distinctions are drawn for initialization and "on-the-fly" modifying of code, but it is really unclear why this is a meaningful distinction to be made
*a division between low-level and high-level languages is also embedded in the article
**this seems to imply that self-modifying code is somehow related to a choice of language, which seems at odds with generic computation theory
**the provided examples seem remote from an average reader
***the low-level examples seem to focus on arcana without grounding the examples in practical reality
****these examples seem teleological
****it's unclear whether the low-level examples are historical curiosities, or still have practical value
***the high-level examples seem to just be examples that it "can be done" in the language, leaving a practical example for the reader to intuit
****many of the listed languages aren't mainstream
*there seems to be some unstated assumption running through the article about the useful ___domain of applicability of self-modifying code
*there aren't "side-by-side" examples of self-modifying code and non-self-modifying code, allowing for an apples-to-apples comparison of techniques
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