August 23, 2003

New Header part deux

Ok, I'll stop this chatter in a moment... I've changed back to the old header with the Williamsburg sky -- photo taken right outside my window. This puts the Madame inside one of the buildings in the picture... get it? Very Waste Land-y, huh?

Occasionally, the Fox News team can be seen peering into my room, but on this particular day it was blank, like a very ill-designed satellite dish:

williamsburg_sky.jpg

The old new header -- the one of the American flag in the UPS garaga (see below) is being used on all of the archive, individual entry pages, etc. I think it's just too loud for the homepage, which features enough colorful stuff as it is, generally.

Posted by Brian Stefans at August 23, 2003 01:23 PM | TrackBack
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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.

Posted by: Barnabas at January 18, 2004 05:24 PM

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.

Posted by: Archibald at January 18, 2004 05:24 PM

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: Mary at January 18, 2004 05:24 PM

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

Posted by: Reginald at January 18, 2004 05:24 PM

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

Posted by: Tabitha at January 18, 2004 05:25 PM