Arrays in Rev (long)

[Richard Gaskin]

Troy Rollins wrote:
> On Jul 12, 2004, at 10:54 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> 
>> One nice thing about using stacks for storage, though:  you're always 
>> only one line away from saving that data if you ever need that 
>> somewhere down the road.
>
> ;-)
> 
> Good point(s).
> 
> And your point about using what the engine provides in order to make our 
> jobs easier... that is my point as well.
> 
> I do have some continued unlearning to do. I'm not surprised though that 
> some who visit from other programming languages don't stay long. Some of 
> these concepts are alien, and go against the grain of everything they 
> have ever known. I'm opting to stick it out and fight through my 
> frustration, and unlearn where required.

If a programmer is only familiar with C-inspired languages, maybe.  But 
most programmers I know tend to pick up the very different ways of 
working with the unique attributes of various languages more adeptly 
than you give them credit.

Lisp and Perl don't work much like JavaScript or C.  I've even seen some 
formally-trained programmers enjoy Icon Author and Authorware.  And 
coercing one's thinking into a timeline hasn't hurt Director's sales, 
even if timeline-centric app development is nearly unique to 
Macromedia's mindset and not at all common outside of that company.

Keep in mind that Transcript does not prevent you from using associative 
arrays or delimited lists, both of which are common to most other 
languages and well supported in Transcript.

But you had unusual requirements, looking for a single place to keep an 
unsually broad variety of disparate data, so it should not be surprising 
that the result was as unusual as the requirement. :)

With a little deeper understanding of each of the types of data you're 
working with I might have suggested a solution involving some mix of 
arrays and lists, or something else more "traditional".  And an 
old-school HyperCarder might have suggested putting everything in fields 
(which, on occassion, isn't a bad way to do things).


> It helps if I think of stacks as very flexible databases...

I think it does; yes, RAM-based databases.  Another xTalk (Gain 
Momentum, the only other UNIX xTalk IIRC) uses the term "database" to 
describe the object whose Rev equivalent is a "stack".

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev