AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Ward would be a huge draw for the Disseminary; hope he contributes in some way. Any chance Ward's talk is available in some audio/video format, or will be put in print? Theology and S/M are very on target for my dissertation-to-be.

I was sorry that I missed it. I had heard about Ward's coming through a post that Michelle sent from the Humanaties Center and through Regina. Sounds very promising for the Disseminary.

Eric — alas, this was a Northwestern event and I even find out about it till a couple of days ago. I didn't have the chance to talk with him in advance to try to arrange permission to reproduce the lecture electronically. I asked about it after the talk, and he said that a version of it is out in a Swedish journal (presumably not Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok). Apart from that, he suggested it might not be available for a couple of years. You could think of contacting him directly; he’d probably be willing to share.

Frank, yes, it’s the people like Graham who see right away what we’re about, who give us hope that this really may fly.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

But variables get one benefit people do not

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

Let's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.