[This is not--I repeat not--from the Onion or any other source of satirical news. Events are rapidly outstripping satire and soon we will be making fun of ourselves in reverse...]
"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans!'," Jay Garner told reporters, saying that Iraq's oil fields and other infrastructure survived the war almost intact.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The retired general overseeing Iraq's postwar reconstruction said on Wednesday that his fellow Americans should beat their chests with pride at having toppled Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) without destroying the country's assets.
"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans!'," Jay Garner told reporters, saying that Iraq's oil fields and other infrastructure survived the war almost intact.
Garner, who was speaking after talks with visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad, took the media to task for emphasizing anti-American demonstrations and dissent in the wake of the three-week U.S. led war that deposed Saddam.
His comments came after U.S. troops opened fire for the second time this week on an angry crowd protesting against the U.S. presence in the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad. Iraqi hospital officials said two men were killed in the latest incident. At least 13 died in shooting on Monday, they said.
Garner said the war was fought in a way that prevented Saddam's forces from setting fire to its oilfields and had largely preserved Iraq's infrastructure intact:
"I was planning on the oilfields being torched, a huge humanitarian crisis and a monumental reconstruction task, " he said.
"There is no humanitarian crisis ... and there's not much infrastructure problem here, other than getting the electrical grid structure back together."
The situation in Baghdad was improving every day and power had been restored to about half of the city, he said.
The U.S. military is increasing its presence in the Iraqi capital to boost security and help in wiping out pockets of resistance from diehard Saddam supporters.
Posted by David Perry at April 30, 2003 01:35 PM | TrackBackThe 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: Petronella on January 18, 2004 11:02 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: Joyce on January 18, 2004 11:02 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: Lionel on January 18, 2004 11:03 PMBut 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: Joos on January 18, 2004 11:03 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: Theodosius on January 18, 2004 11:04 PM