AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Still one of my favourite records to cook to.

There was a period of time in the late 80s where I had a 60 minute tape consisting of nothing but "St. Elmo's Fire", Gabriel's "Mother of Violence", and Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" playing back-to-back over and over again.

A bit sad, I know, but true.

What do you think the geneaology is between eno and dar

Michael —is that the “Shipbuilding” that Elvis Costello wrote? I don’t know Wyat’s.

Trevor —

eno
end
ent
eat
ear
dar

eno
ent
eat
ear
dar
would be shorter, and would avoid adding, dropping, and adding the "d."

It's the same song, but I prefer Wyatt's heartsore, breathy delivery. I think Elvis actually wrote it for Wyatt - as Wyatt's recording pre-dates Declan's (on Punch the Clock). I have a copy of the Wyatt single from 82, and it also shows up on a reissued version of his superb "Nothing Can Stop Us" album. Check it out, if you can - I think you'd like it.

Elvis and his crew show up on Wyatt's recording, btw - the track listing includes:

Clive Langer - organ
Steve Nieve - piano
Mark Bedford - double bass
Martin Hughes - drums
Elvis Costello - backing vocals
Robert Wyatt - percussion, vocals

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

We 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.

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.