Arrays in LC [was: Re: [TAO] value() to obtain pointer functionality]

[Jacques Hausser]

Bill and Richard,

I fully agree with Bill about the ease of implementing the necessary matrix operations functions in LC language - I did it, actually, for what I needed, like computing eigenvalues and eigenvectors. It's not even so slow if your matrices are not enormous ! And just today, I got a message from bugzilla-daemon telling that at Runrev they have worked out (avaiting build) the possibility to pass subarrays by reference - very useful ! So we already have a very good tool for occasional matrix operations. 

What I suggested is ONLY to deprecate (not suppress, just deprecate) the two part keys in bidimentional arrays like myMatrix[i,j] and to allow matrixMultiply and transpose to work with matrices built with [i][j] notation. Seems to me it would be more coherent.

As for big matrices crunching, well, meteorologists working with Cray machines probably don't use LiveCode... (perhaps they should, to get more convincing forecasts).

Jacques