[ANN] LiveCode List Processor

[Alex Tweedly]

Never mind objects; we could restate it as .... "LC has no way to handle 
lists of arbitrary chunks of data".

Your phrase " ... simple matter of ... return-delimited chunk ..." hides 
the the real issue:
    what if the chunks of data might contain 'return's ?

You can find another character which is less likely (!!?) - but that 
doesn't give you "arbitrary data".
Or you coerce it by encoding / decoding every time you put data into / 
out of the list, or <lots of more complicated things>.
But those all make it less than simple, and less than efficient.

And, of course, inserting / deleting from such delimited "pseudo-lists" 
is considerably less efficient than the constant time cost you would 
expect from "real" lists :-)

-- Alex.



On 12/10/2015 22:51, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Mark Wieder wrote:
>
> > Richard Gaskin <ambassador at ...> writes:
> >
> >> Given the simplicity of chunk expressions, is that needed?
> >
> > Absolutely. LiveCode doesn't without additional complexity support
> > singly- or doubly-linked listed of arbitrary objects.
>
> I realize extra code is needed to implement linked lists of objects, 
> my question is whether we need to work that hard to handle chunks of 
> data in LiveCode.
>
> I may well simply misunderstand the role of his library.  I had 
> thought it was focused on working with data rather than objects, and 
> if so it would seem a relatively simple matter of maintaining a 
> pointer into a return-delimited chunk for the "next", "prev", etc. 
> features he described, along with chunk expressions.
>
> I hadn't considered the possibility of using theses lists to contain 
> objects, though.  Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how I'd use that. 
> Seems to be a pattern with me today - time for better coffeee.... :)
>