AKMA’s Random Thoughts

It is VERY, VERY, VERY cold in the winter. Don't forget to pack your wooly underwear!

THere is a small town in Mississippi named Aberdeen - is that the one you mean?????

There's a fishing-port and sawmill-town Aberdeen on Washington's Pacific coast; not so cold as the original perhaps, but rather wet and gray nine months of the year. Perhaps the number of Aberdeens outside of Scotland (I believe there's one in New Jersey, also, as well as in Australia and New Zealand) allows one to draw some conclusions about the place the founders of those towns came from.

Do you mean the one in South Dakota? Really windy and cold in the winter. SDSU is there.

If I recall correctly, and I'll have to go dig up old paper journals to confirm this, in March of 1993 Aberdeen was a hole. It was frigid and bereft of anything entertaining to do. There wasn't even anything all that educationally or historically significant that we could find to do. Every other town we stayed in during that Scotland tour was packed with excitement. In Aberdeen we bought a fifth of Jack Daniels and went to see Blade Runner at a midnight movie theater. Feh.

So Amy, is that a negative review?

Yeah well, I'm nothing if not blunt.

Aberdeen in scotland has a strong history and philosophy of science and technology program. Traditionally, it is an ancient school, with many museums and things to see, but i don't know about living there. I know it is cold, by reports. if you want, email me, and I can put you in touch with one of my local colleagues.

Big on grey granite construction materials. Oil, sea and gas exploration hub of the UK economy. cold. windy. far away. speak funny colloquial lingo and vocabulary. sound funny too. sheep.

I did my Phd thru Aberdeen so I am biased. I also was there mainly in Spring, so again, am biased - one of the best university's in UK - systematics is a bit Barthian, prac theology is world-leading.
City is grey, granite- wonderful beaches- I love it. Thoroughly.
Email if you want more bias

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.

The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.

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.

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.