You could give me chapter and verse about the heat death of the universe

[austin_dern]

I broke a glass. I've been expecting to lose one for a year and a half, since I got a matching set of six, and figured I'd inevitably drop one on the tile floor. Thus, this one broke when I knocked it over while it was in the sink. It shattered from a drop of nearly two inches. I don't get it, but once a glass of mine exploded as Spaceroo stood up near it.

Also the elevators on campus have been getting unpredictable, skipping floor calls, or jamming doors partway open and rattling the cab frighteningly before finally pushing open. I dread the prospect the elevators have this week's Windows Death Virus of Death. And my first use of my shiny new staff card saw the library self-checkout station get stuck, refusing to accept the # key which ends the checkout. I hope it was just stack-clearing, but those machines I know are hooked up to the Internet, and so are probably infected.

It would be easy to read this as ominous for tonight's U.S. Presidential Election, but I have a more compelling thing for this to be ominous for. Tomorrow is a surprise Peer Evaluation. My plan was to finish up strings and introduce pointers; I can't think of any interesting things to say about them, or programs to demonstrate writing, so tomorrow may well be a lot of stammering on my part.

Trivia: Unable, as Pennsylvania Assembly clerk, to debate, Benjamin Franklin amused himself by designing numerical magic squares. Source: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson.

Currently Reading: The Visitors, Clifford Simak. Aliens from outer space send a giant cube that lands in Minnesota. It proceeds to eat trees. They'll do anything for entertainment in Minnesota.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

Pointers seem awfully pointless when you first introduce them. It isn't until you get into dynamic memory allocation, linked lists, binary trees that they really start to make sense.

It does surprise me you got this far without talking about them, though. How can you discuss strings, or even argument passing, without bringing up pointers?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, strings I only introduced last week, and it's rather natural to use them as elision from arrays to pointers. Mostly I've avoided going too much into the details of how C stores variables, except that separate functions get separate blocks of memory and have their own little playgrounds with which to work.

The only baffling stuff started up last week, with string variable names pointing to memory locations, and I gave a couple demonstrations of how things don't work the way anyone expects. So I can improvise on that. Actually, I'm thinking of a program that concatenates a file into a comma-separated list, which seems likely to demonstrate a bunch of the trickier aspects. Then on to just enough pointers to leave everyone confused.