AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Its not just cultural institutions! For my job before seminary, I frequently had to call admissions departments and career centers at other universities - it sometimes took six or seven screens before I could an address or phone number!

This is not just a cathedral problem, nor just a postal address problem. Try finding out how to contact anybody at all at Lambeth Palace from www.archbishopofcanterbury.org for example.

I would suggest that not providing email addresses or telephone numbers is a greater sin of omission than not providing postal addresses.

Simon

What up, AKMA? No link to Westminster Cathedral?

A common sin of the web-centric - forgetting that outside the net there is a real brick-and-mortar world with real people in it.

But variables get one benefit people do not

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.

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.

The rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:

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.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.