End Game

Yes, it is completely about oil,
to France, Russia and Germany.
History has made strange bed fellows,
the mattress an envied enemy.

“We speak for the children of Iraq.
The ones who will suffer we support.
Oh Dear, too many rallies, no time.
In the child’s best interest let’s abort.”

Hollywood has taken a limo,
to a “No Blood for Oil” protest.
Off should go the idiot box,
if hypocrisy is what you detest.

The former speaks “U.N. Permission.”
On Terror he was “Let’s wait and see.”
Yet, the bombs rained down on Kosovo,
without resolution or decree.

Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen and counting,
enough strapless resolutions.
Each only forces Miss America to,
International Prostitution.

Do you have any weapons? Go Fish.
Inspections don’t cut it, never will.
Few token cards placed on the table,
while under, the deck is shuffled still.

Backlash Sleepers strike here and abroad.
A real time blood fest, for the long haul.
The scenarios are worth facing,
to prevent an A-Bomb on the Mall.

No, Saddam links not with Al-Qaeda.
They interpret a different Koran.
Could Anti’s truly be that Naive,
For God’s sake, they have the exact plan.

America, I agonize too,
Someone I love is in the force.
Let us all show support for our troops.
Pray the President steers the right course.

Now that I like!

Do you mind if I post it on other boards? With your name attached of course...

For this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.

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.

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.

This 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.

When 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.