AKMA’s Random Thoughts

One of the joys of pastoral ministry is the fact that I know it is coming every Sunday. Some pastors I know take a certain time every week and grind out a sermon during that time. I can't do that. I need time for sermons to grow and develop so I generally work at a couple at one time, looking, researching, and praying about what I am called to talk about. It works really well until a friend of mine says, "can you come by and speak to the staff or leadership of my church on Wednesday". I usually say yes and then I realize, "I have nothing to say to them" and I go to bed hoping for homeletical dreams or the West Wing has something relevant to talk about.

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

This is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.

But variables get one benefit people do not

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.

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.

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.