AKMA’s Random Thoughts

In a bubble of synchronicity, a friend the other night remarked that he was going deeply in debt. "Haven't got a sou," he said. Then in an embarassing attempt at cross cultural reference, he revised his statement to "I really don't have a nickel." To be sous sou is so sad, doncha think?

Frank, woldn't it be “sans sou”?

“Sans sou,” see?

No matter how bad the player, I'm flattered whenever people think of me whenever they hear an accordion.

Was he really that bad? i could've sworn that the French or perhaps the Academie kept strict quality control over this kind of stuff.

Merci AKMA. I see... as they say in Potsdam, you must pardon my French.

Drat... I thought I had linked "Potsdam" to this tourist site:

http://www.berlin-en-ligne.com/potsdam_sanssouci.php

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

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.

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.