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[Here's a Christmas poem I distributed -- or attempted to distribute -- in lieu of gifts 12 or so years ago when I was broke and America was waging war on Iraq. Nothing much has changed, so I guess it's still relevant. I was reading a lot of Auden at the time as you can probably tell. There's also a touch of misanthropy (I tried to save it with the saccharine final lines) which held me back from actually making copies for my relatives, so no one's actually seen this poem except my old school chum Thomas Crofts. Happy Xmas!]
IF this Christmas you feel
nothing but unique gall
at ceremonies which seem
the indecipherable sum
to a human mathematic:
the human mind is stuck
in Thought’s thorns and pricks
--might as well get him socks!
If through winter’s mist
shouts the routine Must
and pleasures for the kids
don’t taunt experienced heads
like color for a sister’s
nightgown, or dear brother’s
difficult taste in hats
or brand-names for the aunts
If for the special racket
you finger the vacant pocket
swear one time you had it
now some bureaucrat’s got it
to finance a mutual war
--if in department store
your spiteful credit card
whispers what you most feared
If you have marked dissent
of a conscience sorely bent
by measures you have taken
to service each guest wine
--though not wine for a king
the mind now fully swung
to conclude the season’s ill
with a long, long-distance call
--Then, presuppose a pass
a lucky, explored course
between the gift of chance
and awkward social science
--a poem is what you mean:
the riddle of deliberate man
whether object or good dead
is solved by the schemer’s word.
The Indignant Cruelty of Being Same
I had for a mirror the worn indented page
if your Olivetti make sound on paper
perhaps you felt it in your hands
The significance of the would, and I see
the face of the surface appears to belong to eyes
the becoming of the life sentence and all
that the language tends toward shaped your confluence of motion thought
Given to ritual, the prayer book, a kneeling to the spider, Koran-wise
Intentions passed for your truth
the sky parted and the sun made its name
some dawn, sky cracked by it’s covering
and the night kept being ashamed
But 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: Faustinus at January 18, 2004 05:59 PMLet'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: Lambert at January 18, 2004 06:01 PM