While Doc and I were recapping DigID world, we sympathized about feeling, in Doc’s now-canonical metaphor, like farmers at a paving convention. I wondered what more we were doing there than hanging out with friends. I suppose that it may deflect Microsoft a few microdegrees further toward openness by mingling the Man Behind Palladium/NGSCB with Cory Doctorow (I’d say "more than a few" out of respect for Peter, but I don’t want to overestimate the extent to which the ocean liner’s course could be altered by an encounter with a couple of friendly marine mammals) , but perhaps there’s something else at work. Just unadulterated speculation, but maybe bringing grassroots advocates to DigID World extends the "real human being" pole of the DigID discourse further out, putting such admirable ventures as PingID and its related enterprises closer to what can be seen as the center.
Whatever. For no obvious reason, Eric and André and Phil made space at what was fundamentally an enterprise conference for outsiders to hold up mirrors, to tell the corporate behemoths (and would-be behemoths) what they look like from mere mortals. That’s a gesture of unusual hospitality, and I thank them very much.
Posted by AKMA at October 18, 2003 04:04 PM | TrackBackThat 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.
Posted by: Florence at January 13, 2004 02:29 AMEarlier 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.
Posted by: Godfrey at January 13, 2004 02:29 AMOur 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.
Posted by: Joseph at January 13, 2004 02:30 AM