Paul Wellstone was the kind of elected official who tempted Margaret and me to wish we believed that the electoiral-politics system actually had the potential to effect change in the USA. We know a staff member of his, though it seems that our friend must have been based in DC. We were anxious for a few hours, waiting to see who else was on Wellstone’s plane, but our friend was not.
Was Wellstone an “idiotarian”? Or more like this. . . ?
And Anil Dash has been targetted for hate mail since he dared question the tenor of discourse over at Little Green Footballs. We instant-messaged for a few minutes, and he manifestly welcomed positive wishes, even from someone who had never addressed him before.
It looks, however, as though the US will be driven into war on the basis of a collection of non sequiturs and untruths. Pippa willing (and that’s a big proviso), I’ll look for you all at Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago tomorrow at noon.
Posted by AKMA at October 26, 2002 12:10 AM | TrackBackBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Nicholas at January 13, 2004 08:32 AMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Timothy at January 13, 2004 08:33 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Chroseus at January 13, 2004 08:33 AM