The following is a representation of the information stored by our variable x, that is, the variable in the main method of our Java program:
You'll notice that this variable has three core components; let's go through them quickly:
- On the left-hand side, I put this variable's name, which is the keyword that we use to reference it within the scope, and a memory location. Our variables point to a memory location, and in this memory location, we store the variable's value.
- We can think of the name and memory location as being very static; they're not really going to change for this individual variable identifier throughout the course of our program's execution. However, we can, and often do, freely change the value stored in the variable's referenced memory location.
So why is this important? Well, over the course of...