Come off it, Tha'lab, you faker, you kadhib,
yes, very funny, but for goodness sake, just
put back those purple bowels in your tummy,
you'll be late for work!
Make haste, Safia, you little scamp, you pig-tailed qasida,
put that fat flap of scalp back on your crown,
now's not the hour for teenage pranks,
it's time to go to school!
Ah, quit moaning Miss Al-Sayab, you muwashshara,
we know that fetus hanging from your bottom is a rubber trick—
we're not stupid, you know, so cease being crass,
and get ye to market!
Cut the crap, Nizar, you iltizam,
pick that torso up and put it back on your dancing spine—
we know that old box and mirror trick,
now get thee to prayers!
Hey, Rashid, you al-nahda,
we know you love the special effects of Hollywood movies,
but it's not safe to make yourself into a geyser of fire—
and anyway, you're supposed to be accompanying the inspectors!
Say there, little Samih, you shirnur,
six-month-olds aren't supposed to be able to fly—
so get down from those power lines and gather
your legs and head on the ground here, you naughty child!
Listen, Tawfiq, you tafila,
OK, so you're a sorry-assed academic with a Ba'ath mustache,
but put your brains back into your head, you can't fool us by calling in sick—
it's time for class and your students are ablaze!
Yo bro, my main-man Bashad, you tardiyyat,
you're as if dead and white as marble, but there's not a scratch on your body—
quit fucking around, the mosque is rubble,
make the siren light flash and spin on your ambulance!
Greetings Ahmad, you badi-kamriyyat,
put your face back on and also that water pipe hose thing back into your belly—
you've been a joker since you were five,
but now you're a father, so pick up that basket of combs and gum!
Good morning, Mrs. al-Jurjani, you madin,
author of four essays on postmodern currents in American poetry,
what are you howling and wailing like that for, hitting your skull
against the flagstones like a mechanical hammer?
A horse is a horse, and if a horse is dead, a horse is dead—
More so, you are naked, which is unbecoming of a lady your age and standing.
Like Hamlet, your emotion is unconvincing, for it exceeds its object.
Therefore, we beseech you: Put a plug in it.
A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Eli on January 18, 2004 08:16 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Cornelius on January 18, 2004 08:17 PMThat 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: Isabella on January 18, 2004 08:17 PMOur 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: Justinian on January 18, 2004 08:18 PMThis 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: Julius on January 18, 2004 08:18 PM