(Gothic News Service, 3/07/03) The White House sought to dispel rumors today that the National Endowment for the Arts was in the planning stages for a series of poetry readings by American poets in Occupied Iraq. For weeks it's been rumored that the Endowment was in consultation with Laura Bush's office on ways in which both contemporary and classic American authors could be best introduced into a post-Saddam Iraq.
The First Lady is apparently convinced that the transmission of American cultural values - especially as represented in the voices of American poets - is essential to building a country in which its citizens will be entitled to practice free expression. To best foster the most attention from the Iraqi public, it was said that the Endowment was trying to determine which one of Baghdad's symphony halls or museums would be an ideal performance location for the invited poets. Earlier on, a Pentagon consultant was reported to have suggested that the Food Distribution Centers would be more ideal since they - in terms of collateral damage - would be the least likely to be damaged or destroyed during the bombing of Iraq.
"First," in refuting these claims, the unnamed spokesman for the White House was quoted as saying, "Though we expect it to be soon forthcoming, there has been no final decision to either invade or occupy Iraq. Further, any such program would undoubtedly include other art forms, choirs and such. But, at this time, we want to remind you, any such planning is totally premature."
When asked whether or not poets to be invited will include those who have written poems against the war, the spokesman said, "When the time is right, you will have to refer that question to the head of the Endowment. It's a free country but we believe he has strongly held views on the questionable value of combining politics and poetry."
Posted by Brian Stefans at March 10, 2003 08:57 PMReportedly, Iraq's population of approximately 10 million children (half the total population) is hoping against hope that they won't be murdered by American bombs next week. They've heard that George Bush himself may come to Iraq for specially arranged readings of that American classic, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar"
Posted by: Shauna on March 16, 2003 05:39 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Digory on January 18, 2004 07:49 PMSince 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.
Posted by: Effemia on January 18, 2004 07:49 PMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Kenelm on January 18, 2004 07:50 PMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Thadeus on January 18, 2004 07:51 PMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Abraham on January 18, 2004 07:52 PM