AKMA’s Random Thoughts

FWIW,

I recently read Jerome Neyrey's _Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew_ and found it excellent. I'm preparing to teach a 6 week sunday School class on NT setting issues, and Neyrey's was the best written and most fruitful work I've run into so far.

Me, I cheat and use those "What are they saying?" volumes from Paulist Press when I wind up teaching bits of NT. ;) As it happens, Matthew is my favorite gospel -- it's the one that bothers me the most (that's a compliment), and it's the only one that feels like the Tanakh to me (which is presumably as it should be). Mark is the one that makes me believe there was a guy named Jesus, Luke is the one that makes me believe that there was an historical Jesus Movement, and John is the one that reminds me how goofy it is to pretend that Second Temple Judaism and Hellenistic thought were thoroughly antagonistic (okay, I don't much like John) -- but Matthew is the one that makes me really, really wonder whether Jesus wasn't a prophet after all.

I hope you'll tackle a question I ran into a lot during interfaith worship planning: is preaching an exclusively Christian activity, and does it necessarily imply "the gospel"? (What is the difference between preaching and proclaiming, for that matter?) I managed to horribly offend someone once by saying that I didn't see why the Holy Spirit had to be personally involved in every sermon -- and to this day I don't feel especially apologetic about offending that person, but I do feel curious about how the heck that must work on a weekly basis.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

Our 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.

But 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.