Bart said:
I'ld say it's a buffering issue then.
Then I would say that you are being irrelevant.
When a variable gets a new value,
This would be a javascript variable? Something that is specified as a
property added to a dynamic object and, by implication, has both value
and type. That may make a javascript variable a structure attached in
some way to another structure, where both the structures and the nature
of their attachment are no more than possibilities that may be manifest
in the implementation, may have almost any arbitrary form and will be
influenced by the implementation language.
there are 2 possible ways:
No there are not. There is a very wide spectrum of possibilities in
implementing javascript variables.
(1) The memory address gets populated with new bytes; or
"The memory address"? In practice hundreds of memory addresses may have
new values written to them during the creation of a javascript variable.
(2) It points to another memory address, where the original
address keeps its current content (and is not freed).
If you are going to think about it on this level there is only one
possibility; The creation of a javascript variable results in values
being written into bytes at memory addresses. There is absolutely no
point in saying so, because that is both obvious and trivial.
I'm not sure if there's a physical equivalent for a
pointer.
A program counter, as a register that is intended to only hold a
reference to a memory location, is probably as close as hardware gets to
having a 'pointer' (and, unlike address registers, you would come
unstuck pretty quickly if you attempted to store data in a program
counter).
But no computer can work without the concept.
Computers are machines, they work quite successfully without perception
or conception.
While computers must interpret some bit patterns as memory addresses the
bit pattern is only a memory address at the point when it is used as a
memory address. In machine code there are no 'pointers', only the act of
addressing memory.
The bits itself do not mean anything - together they
form a byte, and the byte responds to
something in the mind of the programmer.
I assume that was supposed to be 'the byte _corresponds_ to ...'.
Which makes my point, at the very lowest level there is no meaning, and
at the javascript level the lowest level has been hidden behind a
spectrum of (largely unimportant) implementation details. Picking some
arbitrary level in-between and trying to make generalisations about
javascript is not a viable (or valuable) practice.
Not directly. The traditional representation of a bit pattern
since many decades is a range holding ones and zeros.
Are you saying that ones and zeros are not intergers?
It's an abstraction of course.
Yes, as is thinking about bit patterns as integers, or hex numbers. I
would say that hex was the most traditional representation of a bit
pattern.
You could think of it as a bunch of people, where males
are 0 and females 1, for example.
Why on earth would I want to do that?
Nor any other meaningful concepts.
But allocating memory is certainly happening by means
of electronic circuits (which is how chipsets hold data).
Electronic circuits acting under the direction of a program. The meaning
of what those circuits are doing comes from the programmer. If the
programmer has programmed memory allocation the circuits are not aware
that memory allocation is what they are doing, and you could not validly
deduce that memory allocation was the concept in the mind of the
programmer by observing the actions of the circuits (even if you could
assert a strong probability to making that conclusion form some
observations).
Yes, that is correct.
No. Memory is a physically stored range of bit statusses.
Memory is not "a memory address", which is what your statement above is
about.
Say I have 2
bottles (each bottle is a bit, together they represent 1 byte).
Then I imagine that:
- 0 is the equivalent of two empty bottles
- 1 is the equivalent of a full bottle + an empty bottle
- 2 is the equivalent of an empty bottle + a full bottle
- 3 is the equivalent of two full bottles
Suppose I want to remember the value "3" ...
<snip>
I thought you didn't want to be patronising? For future reference; I
know enough about electronics to build a working computer out of valves,
relays or transistors for myself (in the very unlikely event that doing
so become necessary, given the wide availability of microchips in
general).
Sure, that's correct. If you have an iron with javascript
support, the iron would compile the javascript code.
Which is as worthless as a statement as saying that a computer will
compile the javascript code that is executed on it. You original stamens
related to the behaviour and actions of browsers and the javascript
implementations that they contain.
Richard.