I love Renee French! I actually got "in trouble" for writing a very positive review of this very book in Rain Taxi. Someone--I won't name names--wrote to me to tell me that I was completely principleless, amoral, and so on. My take was simply that French writes horror--and that effective horror crosses ethical/moral boundaries--how else is it supposed to scare you? Or something like that.

Well, Gary, you are pretty principleless, amoral, and so on, and if I knew an editor I could write to about that...

(This is a joke.)

I wonder how many women writers have gotten into trouble for making the kind of stuff French does here -- i.e. she's as close to Burroughs as they come, and -- I think because of the incredible quietness and reserve in these pieces -- much scarier than someone like Kathy Acker. This quietness reminds more of David Lynch in Eraserhead, but with more than a touch of David Cronenberg in Dead Ringers. My point being that women have certainly been censored, but for expressions of sexuality that usually remain within the pale of at least pornography as it's conventionally understood.

Well, I don't know quite what I mean here... Dorothea Tanning anyone? Phoebe Gloeckner?

Inside 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.

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

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.

For 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.

We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.