Dean of Virtuality
Posted on:: November 24th, 2003
Edward Castronova is looking for a university dean who wants to house a Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds. If you wonder whether there’s useful academic work to be done by such a center, check the Terranova group blog.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Let’s take a moment to reexamine that. What we’ve done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we’re storing data in it. That’s the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that’s really called favoriteNumber, and it’s the one we’re working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn’t big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.