Limbo is a world which allegorically represents the mortal world (Matthew 7.24). The ending is a heaven sequence. Cobb demonstrates faith by rejecting Mal and then sacrifices his life to rescue Saito. This triggers a symbolic death ("you have to die to wake up") followed by the forgiveness of sins (at immigration) and the reunion of the family in the heavenly garden. This is classic Christian allegory and it's amazing more people aren't commenting on it.
The ending is no more a dream than heaven is hell. And the only significance of the spinning top is that Cobb ignores it (another demonstration of faith). That said, since it's an interesting question how one models death and redemption in code, my suggestion would be a segfault and then return to root?
The Inception Movie explained to my son (by Donald Duck, none the less) [1]. Almost all the scenario and the "innovative" concepts of the film come from a 2004 Scrooge McDuck comic.
I've linked to Cracked (even though they might not be seen as the most serious source) because their account is detailed and very documented.
Basically, it spawns threads for each 'dreamer.' Then they spawn more threads for each dream level, and wait for the lucid_dreamer-s in lower levels to accomplish their task, while printing what's going on. Think of it like the good old dining philosopher's program, where threads represent the diners.
From the readme: "My tribute to Nolan in "C" Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind."
I assume it's to make that trick work. Maybe run in on a VM, just in case. :-)
> the ending is still a state of limbo
Limbo is a world which allegorically represents the mortal world (Matthew 7.24). The ending is a heaven sequence. Cobb demonstrates faith by rejecting Mal and then sacrifices his life to rescue Saito. This triggers a symbolic death ("you have to die to wake up") followed by the forgiveness of sins (at immigration) and the reunion of the family in the heavenly garden. This is classic Christian allegory and it's amazing more people aren't commenting on it.
The ending is no more a dream than heaven is hell. And the only significance of the spinning top is that Cobb ignores it (another demonstration of faith). That said, since it's an interesting question how one models death and redemption in code, my suggestion would be a segfault and then return to root?