Arrays in Rev (long)

[Troy Rollins]

On Jul 12, 2004, at 3:09 AM, Ken Ray wrote:

>> Transcript, this has certainly helped me to understand Rev's
>> under-the-hood approach to them. Adding CRs, and doing splits somehow
>> seems a bit less than straightforward, as you must then do mental
>> translation from string lines, etc. in order to develop appropriate
>> paths to data. Plus, every example you've shown is based on knowing
>> where the data is in the first place - it gets even more complex when
>> one must search within the array for data, and then do a relational
>> path to associated data, no? At some point, the advantages to
>> multi-dimensional arrays would seem to fall by the wayside,
>> overshadowed by array handling complexity.
>
> True. But it really depends on what the data requires. I think where it
> breaks down is the approach to applying the associativeness, which 
> Director
> does in a much cleaner way (although I must add, I can't tell you how 
> many
> hours I and other Director programmers under my supervision have spent
> looking at large multidimensional lists trying to find the proverbial 
> needle
> in the haystack as to where their list went wrong - I'm sure you can
> relate...)

Previous to the Object inspector in Director, I can relate. But they 
saw that too, and now with the Object Inspector, any object, including 
a nested array, can be viewed graphically (like an XML tree) while the 
program is running, with values updated in real time. Now THAT is array 
handling power.
--
Troy
RPSystems, Ltd.
http://www.rpsystems.net