Making Revolution faster using dimensioned arrays

Marielle Lange M.Lange at ed.ac.uk
Fri Jul 8 05:34:50 EDT 2005


No worries, Jon... I didn't either interpret Dennis suggestion as converting
revolution to c++ ;-) (I appreciate the value of his comments -- I even
recently voted for Dennis' last suggestion on stack scope variable).

I just wanted to voice the other perspective. Adding new array declarations and
new array manipulations features, I vote for. This would indeed be most useful
for image processing. However, revolution is primarily a 4GL and a 4GL (high
level programming language) as inherent limitations. With a 4GL, you loose in
sheer speed in terms of data crunching. But you win in speed in ease of use and
data manipulation of reasonably-sized projects. Add-ons, externals, new
functions in revolution, all that is welcome... provided that there is never an
attempt to go down from 4GL to 3GL or less.  I prefer a program that is slow
when asked to manipulate 1000x1000 matrices than a program that is slow and
dumb in all other tasks. Back to the idea that not single tool is best for all
jobs.

------------------

I did not interpret Dennis' suggestion as meaning that ALL arrays would
henceforth ONLY have integer indices; rather, I think he was suggesting
that a NEW type of array be created which had this attribute.  All of
the old code would still work.

:)

Jon



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