AKMA’s Random Thoughts

While you are teaching preaching (there ought to be a Gilbert & Sullivan song for that) your beautiful wife is basking in the sun and ocean breezes here with me, Am I a happy camper? Yes!

Have you considered having the students listen to one or two of their classmate's tapes? I see no conflict in doing this with excercises, and they would get more value from this listening than you do skipping around trying to verify whether and how well they did the task. This wouldn't mean not listening to any on your part, but it would free you from the more tedious parts of it.

Hi, Mom! Yes, Margaret’s happily basking in the island breezes; I’m so glad she could get there, and wish I could be there too 8-( .

Gerry, that’s a fascinating idea. I’ll do that next time around.

I'd like to hear your reasoning for requiring this. I've often thought that seminarians don't get enough time to work on good vocal presentation...an important skill if you're preaching at least once a week.

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.

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

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.