General approach question

Mark Smith mark at maseurope.net
Thu Apr 21 10:43:40 EDT 2005


Here's a question, as much philosophical as practical, and I wonder 
what the list makes of it.

I have an app for keeping track of stock and futures trades. The data 
is effectively a list of days, each day containing a list of open 
trades, one per line, with the details as items in each line. 
Currently, I have  this data in an array, with the keys being the date 
of each day, and each element containing that day's open trades. I 
store the array in a custom property set. This all works perfectly 
well, so I'm not about to change it, but I can't help feeling that this 
is not a particularly 'natural' way to do it in Rev. My background is 
in Hypercard, and I would always have done this by having a stack with 
a card for each day, rather than using arrays and custom property sets. 
I'm wondering if I chose the approach I did simply because as a 
non-professional, I perceived that approach as being more like what a 
pro would do, when perhaps the multiple-cards approach would be more 
'natural' in Rev. I'm pretty sure that having a card for each day 
(approx. 260 trading days per annum) would carry a pretty small memory 
overhead, and searching and sorting always seems to be pretty quick 
using cards...and it would be using the native architecture of a Rev 
stack. I'd be interested to know how people here are making these 
choices.

Cheers,

Mark Smith



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