Blessed are they who endure biblical source criticism, for they will truly enjoy David Clines’s “New Directions in Pooh Studies: Überlieferungs- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien zum Pu-Buch.” Watch out for problems caused by misrepresented fi- and fl- ligatures (typeset letter-combinations that word processors frequently mistranslate from one character set to another). I came by it from the Grove Biblical Studies Bulletin page, to which I was directed from Mark Goodacre’s blog — thanks, Mark!
It’s my day for link-and-comment, because I spent most of the day going to, sitting at, and coming home from the Diocesan Convention, the local branch office’s annual version of the national church’s triennial General Convention (the one that got a lot of press this past summer). It resembles a General Convention in miniature in very many ways: a much smaller display of organizational and merchants’ booths; a smaller legislative agenda (often with less conflict, though I’ve attended my share of acrimonious conventions); hanging out with friends whom you don’t see often enough; and sitting through administrative monologues. It was good to see Bishop Persell up and about after his heart surgery.
As I drove past O’Hare this morning, I realized that it had been a long time since I’d flown off to some conference or another. Ah well, only two weeks till the SBL meeting in Atlanta.
Oh, and I wanted to link-and-comment to the amusing Church Sign Generator (don’t miss the related Church Sign Collection), and to the opening of the Skokie Apple Store (to which Pippa and Josiah and I went, and waited in sub-freezing cold for a half hour for our official Apple t-shirts).
Posted by AKMA at November 7, 2003 09:26 PM | TrackBackOur 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: Susanna at January 12, 2004 08:03 PMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Petronella at January 12, 2004 08:03 PMA 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.
Posted by: Pompey at January 12, 2004 08:04 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Elizabeth at January 13, 2004 09:45 AMLet'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.
Posted by: Roland at January 13, 2004 09:45 AMBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Cadwallader at January 13, 2004 09:46 AM