AKMA’s Random Thoughts

When I occasionally indulge, I prefer a nice stout. Guinness is always good. Lite beer? feh. If you're going to have alcohol, it might as well *taste* like something other than icky flavored water. But then, I often don't fit into female generalisations, especially ones to do with the marketing of commercial products. ;-) I'm also not a model nor a starlet.

Guinness. Heineken.
on tap, preferably.
no contest. no others. no "icky flavored water" (it's just a great quote).

In England women are now allowed to drink beer. The battleground remains in the area of whether it is seemly for a woman to be given a pint glass: most women over 30 would not be seen with anything more than the female half-pint; a glass of different proportions from the male half-pint which is simly a scaled-down pint glass.

However, Nestle market a chocolate bar here called Yorkie and all its sales pitch is devoted to the notion that it is chocolate for men. The wrapper has a "roadsign" No-Women image and the strapline "Do Not Feed the Birds".... The TV ads are all truckers and builders.... Need I tell you any more?

Our 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.

When a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

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.

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.

This variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.