text
stringlengths
1
81
start
float64
0
10.1k
duration
float64
0
24.9
is this, get the value in temp-- that's easy-- and put it at the address in b.
3,220.8
5.53
So we have to go to b and put temp in there.
3,226.33
3.29
So to do that, here's temp, it's the number 1.
3,229.62
4.35
I have to go to the address in b.
3,233.97
1.69
The address and b is 92.
3,235.66
1.18
So let's go there, and aha, let me go ahead then,
3,236.84
3.44
and overwrite the value that's there with the number 1.
3,240.28
7.39
So now this frame of memory on the stack--
3,247.67
3.5
the 91, the 92, and the temporary variable--
3,251.17
2.45
they are, by design of my new function, disposable.
3,253.62
3.43
I really don't care, after swap returns, if those things continue--
3,257.05
5.07
I did care a little bit about that.
3,262.12
1.46
I don't care if those things continue to exist.
3,267.43
2.52
All I care about is that x and y continue to exist.
3,269.95
4.21
So in this way is the new and improved version of the swap function
3,274.16
3.91
actually having a permanent impact on my data?
3,278.07
2.89
And with the frame, the memory still looks like that,
3,280.96
3.07
because it's gone to the address in a.
3,284.03
2.01
Gone to the address in b, which leads it to the original x and y.
3,286.04
4.15
And so by way of pointers, by way of these addresses,
3,290.19
2.87
do we have the ability to actually go much, much deeper into a program
3,293.06
4.75
and actually get at values that previously we
3,297.81
3.43
had no way of even expressing.
3,301.24
3.04
So it's at this point in the story where I usually admit that, at least for me,
3,304.28
5.13
this has been among the most challenging topics when I, myself, was a student.
3,309.41
3.91
And in fact, all these years later-- it's like, 20, 20 year-- yeah,
3,313.32
2.905
I think we're up to 20 years ago.
3,316.225
1.375
20 years ago-- I didn't take this photo then--
3,317.6
2.96
but I sat in what was, at the time, the back right hand corner of Elliot
3,320.56
3.59
House's dining hall, here at Harvard.
3,324.15
2.07
And I sat down with my teaching fellow, who of all the TFs I had
3,326.22
2.93
as an undergrad, still remember to this day, [? Nishat ?] [? Meda ?].
3,329.15
2.42
And we just reconnected on Facebook, all these years later.
3,331.57
2.52
Very exciting.
3,334.09
0.96
And it was he who wonderfully sat down with me
3,335.05
2.419
at office hours one day in the dining hall,
3,337.469
1.791
trying to help me understand pointers, because it was just so much more
3,339.26
3.03
technical than all the other stuff.
3,342.29
1.458
Like, there is no puzzle piece in Scratch for the address of something
3,343.748
3.142
that leads you somewhere so powerfully as these stars seem
3,346.89
3.53
to be able to, here.
3,350.42
1.011
And this is only to say that this is among those topics that
3,351.431
2.499
might take a little bit of time to sink in, but it does.
3,353.93
3.33
And when it does, it really is that proverbial light bulb that goes off.
3,357.26
3.39
And for me, that light bulb went off right then and there.
3,360.65
4.9
Now, what more can we do with these things, after that motivational speech?
3,365.55
3.37
Pointer arithmetic.
3,368.92
1.22
So, sort of complicated sounding topic, but really, it just
3,370.14
3.58
goes back to first principles, as to what a pointer actually is.
3,373.72
3.12
And it allows us now to do things like this.
3,376.84
1.99
Let me go ahead and open up one other program that I wrote in advance here,
3,378.83
3.38
called pointers dot c.
3,382.21
2.11
And take a look at what this thing does here.
3,384.32
2.42
It works a little differently from the syntax we're used to,
3,386.74
2.72
and from any of our crypto problems thus far.
3,389.46
3.09
So notice on this first line here, I get string and I store in s.
3,392.55
4.08
No more string right now, just char star.
3,396.63
1.85
We can be real and talk about it as the address of a char.
3,398.48
3.55
A little sanity check, is s equal equal to null?
3,402.03
2.44
If so, just return.
3,404.47
0.94
Something went wrong, so let's not deal with it now.
3,405.41
2.32
Down here, a for loop.
3,407.73
1.75
For i gets 0 all the way up to n.
3,409.48
3.71
So this is just a standard syntax we've used a few times now, even back
3,413.19
3.05
in week 1 when we just wanted iterate over.
3,416.24
2.36
Or in week 2, when we wanted iterate over the characters in a string.
3,418.6
3.67
But we've never seen this kind of craziness before.
3,422.27
2.85
A star, and then some arithmetic in parentheses.
3,425.12
3.47
In the past, when we wanted to print out a character, as implied by %c here,
3,428.59
5
we quite simply, as I recall, did this.
3,433.59
3.7
Which was nice and intuitive, right?
3,437.29
1.5
The square brackets denote to treat the string
3,438.79
2.327
as though it's an array, which it really is, an array of characters.
3,441.117
2.833
And that means get the i-th character of s.
3,443.95
3.05
But now that we understand what s is, we don't need to use this syntactic sugar,
3,447
5.12
as it's called.
3,452.12
0.64
Any time a language has a feature that's convenient to use,
3,452.76
2.92
and easier to read sometimes, but isn't fundamentally
3,455.68
2.69
necessary to express yourself, it's often
3,458.37
1.75
called syntactic sugar, which means it's just kind of a nicety to have.
3,460.12
3.89
And indeed, that square bracket notation is just
3,464.01
2.98
sugar for this more arcane, but perhaps more well-defined syntax now.
3,466.99
7.42
The star operator in this context is the dereference operator, technically.
3,474.41
4.5
It's the go there operator, as I've been describing it.
3,478.91
2.94
Go to some address.
3,481.85
1.52
Well s, recall, is a string.
3,483.37
1.91
But there is no string.
3,485.28
1.27
Strings are just the addresses of characters now.
3,486.55
2.32
The first in a string.
3,488.87
1.94
So initially in this loop, what am I doing?
3,490.81
3.42
s is the address of a string, the address of its first character.
3,494.23
3.33
And I'm saying, add to s, the value i.
3,497.56
2.7
Well, i is just this variable in my for loop that's initialized to 0.
3,500.26
4.27
So s plus 0 is obviously just s.
3,504.53
3.19
s is the address of a char.
3,507.72
1.86
*s means go to s.
3,509.58
2.97
What do you find when you get there?
3,512.55
1.91
A character, because s is a char star, the address of a character.
3,514.46
3.82
And so printing out %c *s effectively means,
3,518.28
4.41
go print that character right there.
3,522.69
2.2