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your operating system typically lays out your program's memory in a fairly
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standard way.
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There's a chunk of memory down here for something called environment variables.
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There's a bigger growable chunk of memory down here called
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the so-called stack.
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On the opposite side of the picture is a so-called heap.
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Another chunk of memory that actually grows in the other direction.
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So long story short, bad things can happen if both of those
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grow bigger than you intend.
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Then, there's some kind of uninitialized and initialized data up top.
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And then, text.
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Now, it turns out text is the segment of memory where
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your program's zeros and ones live.
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So when you double-click an icon on your Mac or PC
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or when you run the command dot slash something,
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those zeros and ones are loaded from your hard disk or solid state disk
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into RAM or memory.
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And it's put conceptually at the top of the memory
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that your computer program is using.
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And below that is the actual data that your program is using.
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The variables and the values inside of it.
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Now, each of these types of memory have different purposes.
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And we'll see in just a moment what it is that's going on.
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And we'll ultimately peel back these layers.
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So what is it that's actually going on underneath the hood here?
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Well, let's consider this to be my computer's memory.
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So focusing on just that bottom most portion,
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which I called the stack a moment ago.
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So if we draw just the bottom of my computer's memory kind of like this,
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the bottom of it has technically environment variables.
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But let's focus on the region known as the stack.
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And the stack, as the name implies, is kind of like the stack of trays
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that you might see in a cafeteria or a dining hall,
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where you put trays on top of another until it can get potentially pretty
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tall.
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And it turns out when you run a program, not
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only is your program given the illusion of this really big memory space laid
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out as proposed, but it also by convention
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uses this memory in a fairly standard way.
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Specifically, when main is called, main is given a chunk of memory
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at the bottom, so to speak, of this stack space.
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And so, let me go ahead here and write main.
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And any local variables that main has and any arguments to main,
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namely argc an argv, end up inside here.
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So if indeed you are using something like argv and argc,
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you might have a value like this down here.
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And you might have another chunk of memory carved out here for argv.
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And if you have a couple of local variables, for instance x
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and another one, y, those two would be allocated space in this slice
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if you will.
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This frame of memory.
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Meanwhile, if main calls a function, like swap-- swap
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is allocated a swath of memory, a frame of memory, above main by design.
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So if I've called swap, its memory ends up here.
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And if the swap function itself has arguments,
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like a and b or any other local variables,
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those values too are put inside of the so-called stack frame.
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So this might be a and this might be b.
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In other words, the concepts that we've been taking for
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granted, both in Scratch and in C, at the end of the day, boil down to values
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needing to go somewhere physically.
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And so, if you assume that the big rectangular region
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here is your computer's memory.
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And then, you consider that the operating system really
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just slices and dices this memory, such that mains memory is down here.
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Any function that main calls is immediately above it.
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And frankly, if swap called its own function, it would end up above it.
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But now, given this basic definition of memory management
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and the layout of computer program's memory space,
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you can perhaps start to infer why all of these failures
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have started to happen in my program.
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A moment ago, I didn't have argv and argc.
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I just had for instance x and y.
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And I had the value 1 and I had the value 2.
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Main then called swap and put a copy of 1 there and a copy of 2 there.
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And indeed, that's the key insight.
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When a function calls another function, passing in arguments as inputs,
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that the function is being passed to copies of those inputs.
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So at this point in time, if you opened up the lid of your computer
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and looked inside digitally, you would see 1 and 2 down here.
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And you would see another pattern of bits
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representing 1 and 2 up here in duplicate.
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So now when my swap function operates, it
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declares a temporary variable recall, called temp.
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So let me draw that here.
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And as I recall, it stores in temp, which value?
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The value of a.
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The value of a is 1.
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It then took the value of b, put it in a-- which puts that value here.
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And now at this point in the story, a and b are incorrect.
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We still need to put the value 1 in b.
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And that's why we then took temps value, put it in b.
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Thereby giving the me ultimately the number 1 in b's slot as well.
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And so, at this point in the story, temp still exists.
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And a and b have the correct answers, 2 and 1 respectively.
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But the catch is the moment that swap returns, this happens.
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Essentially, everything that was being used above main disappears.
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It's not actually deleted.
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All of those bits are still there, so technically the numbers
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are still there.
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