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we've avoided the essay
struggle does come
with the homology of lunch
and weekend ethics
purple sky barely breaks
through ceiling
she pauses before the screen
while deciding
her confusion is too total
randomness too alive
for a nation in whiplash theater
of plugged-in teenagers
the shoreline overloaded
with swans with signs
pasted to lapels
hovering above the commas
largesse could be a wind
too, verbally abused
with insensitive rejoinders
to fragrant, parisian attitudes
making chalk of bones
last one rotten is a perfect egg
my wincing uncle said
before shattering the wicker chair
standing on empty
proposals for the new school
built of methane gas
imported soft drinks, imported
were never quite remembered
footfalls in the carpeted hallway
untrusted and remiss
gatherings in public forests
punctuated by illiterate sobs
pulsing from big cities
we’ll never get there anyway, this way
who last folded this damn thing?
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.
Posted by: Sarah at January 18, 2004 07:06 PMInside 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.
Posted by: Benedict at January 18, 2004 07:07 PMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Hercules at January 18, 2004 07:08 PMBeing 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.
Posted by: Cuthbert at January 18, 2004 07:08 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Didimus at January 18, 2004 07:08 PM