Block

Block may refer to:

Land subdivisions

Broadcasting

Mathematics

Medicine

Music

Boom Blox

Boom Blox is a puzzle video game for the Wii console, mobile devices and N-Gage 2.0 developed by EA Los Angeles in conjunction with film director Steven Spielberg. The game was released on May 6, 2008, in North America and on May 9, 2008, in Europe. The N-Gage version of the game was released on December 3, 2008.

The game presents a series of physics-based puzzles, the objective being either to keep structures made of blocks from being knocked down or to knock them over by various means, using the Wii Remote to throw, shoot, and grab at the blocks. Boom Blox features a realistic physics system; the angle at which a projectile is launched and how fast it is thrown as well as the mass of the projectile and the type of blocks it comes into contact with influence the results of an action.

The game has over 300 single-player levels as well as over 100 cooperative and competitive multiplayer levels. Additionally, there is a mode that allows players to create their own levels and share them with people added to their Friend Code list via WiiConnect24.

Blocks (C language extension)

Blocks are a nonstandard extension added by Apple Inc. to their implementations of the C, C++, and Objective-C programming languages that uses a lambda expression-like syntax to create closures within these languages. Blocks are supported for programs developed for Mac OS X 10.6+ and iOS 4.0+, although third-party runtimes allow use on Mac OS X 10.5 and iOS 2.2+.

Apple designed blocks with the explicit goal of making it easier to write programs for the Grand Central Dispatch threading architecture, although it is independent of that architecture and can be used in much the same way as closures in other languages. Apple has implemented blocks both in their own branch of the GNU Compiler Collection and in the Clang LLVM compiler front end. Language runtime library support for blocks is also available as part of the LLVM project. The Khronos group uses blocks syntax to enqueue kernels from within kernels as of version 2.0 of OpenCL.

Like function definitions, blocks can take arguments, and declare their own variables internally. Unlike ordinary C function definitions, their value can capture state from their surrounding context. A block definition produces an opaque value which contains both a reference to the code within the block and a snapshot of the current state of local stack variables at the time of its definition. The block may be later invoked in the same manner as a function pointer. The block may be assigned to variables, passed to functions, and otherwise treated like a normal function pointer, although the application programmer (or the API) must mark the block with a special operator (Block_copy) if it's to be used outside the scope in which it was defined.