Re: ‘Super Sub’ multidimensional arrays

[Mark Wieder]

On 3/11/21 4:33 PM, Sean Cole (Pi) via use-livecode wrote:
 > Mark,
 > Give an example of what would be better, not just hit and run with a
 > 'That's crap!' comment. Way to make me feel good for all the hard 
work put
 > in. THANKS BUDDY!

Sean-

Not intended to be a 'that's crap' comment. You've got an excellent 
discussion of multidimensional arrays there.

Obviously if you've got a static file system where folder names never 
change and files don't get moved around then you could have an ideal 
array-based system there. And from your writeup it sounds like you've 
got this working in a real-life system.

NOTE: I wrote this before your latest email came in, so yeah.

I would, of course, have the same hesitations about your system of 
buildings, floors, terminals, etc... in a previous job we moved from the 
10th floor to the 9th floor of the same building. In a database system 
I'd query for every user moving from one floor to the other and adjust 
their location property. If I had to do this in an array based on keys 
that were location parts, I'd have a tougher job to do.

I'd have to parse elements like [186,11,47,10][127,10,2,103] for that 
elusive "10" in the second key in order to find the inhabitants of the 
10th floor, extract their data, remove the old keys, and create new ones 
of [186,11,47,10][127,9,2,103] with the extracted data.

With the other approach [186,11,47,10][127][10][2][103] it's an easier 
task to grab the [186,11,47,10][127][10] array, store it, delete the 
array, and put in the new [186,11,47,10][127][9] array.

I'd probably still use a database for this anyway, but ymmv, no?

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com