AKMA’s Random Thoughts

It's all about Dahler Mehndi, dude. It's actually perfect music to Merengue to. Dahler and I were talking about this last spring, actually, when a mission from the Jedi Council took me up and down the Sind. It's funny - I never expected a Punjabi to be so thoroughly versed in Gadamer. I assume Margaret realizes the irony of asking you about the rehabilitation of the notion of prejudice through a phenomenology of erfahrung in a foreign language? ("Jockamo feeno ai gukhri", fwiw, and which is more appropriate in this situation, is Punjabi for "rehabilitation of the notion of prejudice through a phenomenology of ERLEBNIS") :)
-A

Did you hear John Von Seggern's Asha Bhose vs Nelly Furtado remix? It was on bong boing a while back. Very nice.

Yes, Kevin — terrific. Don’t know this Nelly Furtado person, though.

what is Jockamo feeno ai nané in english

Sheanah: I haven’t the foggiest notion, nor have I ever heard a convincing translation. It’s one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe, if you ask me.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

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.

But variables get one benefit people do not

This code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.