AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Just looking over it, I would think the most charitable (to Wright) way to read this would be for "postmodern" to refer to "synthesis of widely disparate traditions", and the rest referring specifically to Karen Armstrong. I have greatly benefitted from Wright myself, but I don't know enough about Karen Armstrong or about postmodernism to make any judgments here myself.

Would this be any better or more accurate?

Most of this post went over my head, probably because I've never been able to arrive at a working definition of "postmodern," which I think has something to do with art installation that use "appropriated" Barbie dolls and other pop culture images. Some people say that some architecture is "postmodern" which is completely incomprehensible to me.

To some people postmodernism = laziness because they associate it with assembling a new thing out of old parts, thus avoiding the hard work of making something from scratch and at the same time using the original parts in ways the creators never intended and/or would be vehemently against (eg the idea that somehow religious revelation can be put in the service of a personal "quest" for self-fulfillment without reference to, oh, say, sacrifice or obedience).

I suspect Bp Wright was using "postmodern" in its popular rather than academic sense. Much of what happens under the banner of "postmodernism" on the popular level would not survive the scrutiny of those French guys.

If Bp. Wright actually understood what the post-modernist position is on this, I suspect he'd embrace it.

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

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.

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

Note the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.