(a) I vexed Jeff Ward (in a post entitled “Constipation,” of all things), which is a drag because the deeper I get into my presentation, the more I wish he were around here where we could go out for a cup of coffee and I could pick his brains on my topic. He’s so obviously so much sharper on these issues than I am that even if I’m headed in a different direction from he, I’m going to feel like a poseur talking through my ideas in the knowledge that he’s the real Deep Thinker on them.
(b) Luckily for my research day (what I pretend counts as my “research day,” since I spent nearly the whole day teaching, praying, and performing household responsibilities) I finally tracked down what had been haunting the back rows of my memory for ages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one poular mode of biblical instruction invovled the Hieroglyphical Bible or the Bible in Pictures, a sort of rebus-like affair wherein pictures stand in for some of the words. For instance, in this example (from well-known printer Isaiah Thomas’sA Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, or, Select Passages in the Old and New Testaments, Represented with Emblematical Figures, for the Amusement of Youth) shown in the Library of Congress, the author has substituted a haloed Hebrew Tetragrammaton for the English “God,” an odd cloudy shape for “heavens,” a globe for “earth,” and so on. This dovetails exquisitely with Magritte’s observation that “An image can take the place of a word in a proposition” (in the seventh proposition in “Words and Images”).
I found another, Picture Puzzles, or How to Read the Bible By Symbols, with almost identical content. Picture Puzzles, however, does include some real rebuses: in several, the illustrations “king”and “dome” stand in for the word “kingdom.” And no, Joey (happy birthday, Accordion Guy!) and Trevor, these are not just prophecies of the Toronto Blue Jays’ home field. These are all just utterly too cool.
Posted by AKMA at November 5, 2003 08:27 PMI don't know if my thoughts are as deep as they are wide, but I won't quibble.
Regarding the decoding level of symbols on a page, have you read Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word? His chapter on "Digital Decorum and Bi-Stable Allusions" seems pertinent to your research (at least as I guess at it from your blog). The confrontation with surface brought about by the substitution of images for words coincides with Lanham's at/through distinction regarding texts.
Posted by: Jeff at November 6, 2003 12:35 AMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Edith at January 13, 2004 09:42 AMFor 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.
Posted by: Bartholomew at January 13, 2004 09:42 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Helegor at January 13, 2004 09:43 AM