Making Revolution faster using dimensioned arrays

[Dennis Brown]

On Jul 7, 2005, at 7:19 PM, Marielle Lange wrote:

> Hi Dennis,
>
> Sorry, I am not in favour of this if this means that I would loose the
> possibility to index arrays with text or to have to specify the  
> array size in
> advance.

Marielle,

I also use the current array capabilities and do not want to lose  
anything we have.  In fact I am in favor of expanding them further.   
What I propose is a different array organization that is optimized  
for execution speed and space efficiency at the cost of a more  
restricted organizational flexibility.  The restrictions would only  
occur if you wanted to make this tradeoff for a particular array.   
There are many problems that would benefit from this, but not all.   
Mathematical problems would benefit from the packed arrays I propose,  
while many indexing and database like problems benefit from the  
sparse arrays we now have.

Dennis