Jane Austen's peculiarity

[Richmond]

On 10/08/15 02:54, Michael Doub wrote:
> Richmond,
>
> Just so you know what is going on.  Each time a change in made to a 
> field, a lot of management code is executed to properly render the 
> field in case it is needed to be visible.   So when a field is 
> modified within a loop, that field management code is executed over 
> and over.   When the data is moved into a variable then manipulated 
> the field management code is only executed when the results are put 
> back into the field.
>
> In almost all cases it is much faster to copy a field into a variable, 
> manipulate the data, then put it back in the field when you want to 
> make it visible.
>
> Regards,
>    Mike
>

Thanks: you read my mind - I was going to get up this morning and ask 'why'?

I suffer from a serious problem: I learnt all about this sort of stuff 
donkey's years ago (about 30) and
since the fact that I have a computer that sits on my desk that at 
'only' 9 years old wipes the floor
with anything available 30 years ago (VAX mainframe) I had really 
overlooked that sort of thing,
to the extent of completely forgetting about it.

This is, also, the first time I have used a programming 
language/suite/IDE to process large amounts of data since
my BA project in PASCAL (30 years ago) - which, using a much shorter 
text than Jane Austen's complete works
(an English translation of Leibniz's /Monadology/) crashed the 
University of Durham mainframe; and that didn't
render any visual stuff on screen whatsoever.

I shall now become obsessive about loading everything into variables :)

Richmond.