Brian,

Thanks for Circulars.

The hypocrisy of the liberal left is astounding, your values hollow, your purposes destructive, your goals suspect. The People's Law Collective and others of your ilk are nothing but organizations bordering on sedition. If you think to identify yourselves as Americans, it is in name only -- but you and others like you are a national shame. You are not of the sort that made this Country great, and when push comes to shove you will not be allowed to take it down. It is the average American who works hard to raise a family, who has values, both secular and religious, whose ethnic origin is as diverse as the world's, who is the majority, a majority persuasion which goes even beyond numbers, but we do have a limit of patience, and we will respond firmly in the crisis to defend our values, to defend this democracy, and to defend our Country.

Samuel S. Kent, Ph.D.

Samuel Kent:

Although I agree with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, your blind obedience and willful support of thought control is abhorrent. "Real Americans don't question the government"-- Those protesters mentioned above are the most American types I can think of. They question athourity. Although their actions are illogical and utterly stupid from my point of view, they are conspiring to express /their/ views and values, and should be supported to the utmost in their actions. Whose right is it to determine said "universal values"? Only in a communist state can this kind of situation exist.

The hypocrisy of the rabid right-wing conservitives among us is astounding.

BTW, the addition of Ph.D. to the end of your name in a cowardly attempt to command respect is disgraceful. _Real_ men use psudonyms. If your argument requires a title to stand up to analysis, it is invalid. I also doubt that a real Ph.D. would not make such an idiotic argument on a board full of his opponents.

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

Note first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.

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.

But variables get one benefit people do not

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