Hi Dennis, There is a trade-off, there. As a researcher, it matters more that something takes me 1 day rather 5 to progam. It does not matter that much that it takes 1 minute rather than 3 to run (I can always use it as an excuse for a coffee break). What I frequently need to do is create word frequency tables for a 20MB corpus by using frequency[tword] (with each word as a string). I have tried different programming and scripting language and the one I sticked with was gawk, a non GUI efficient text processor (like Perl, without the unlegible code syntax). Not to be able to use a string as array index did put me off of Visual Basic (I found solutions to bypass that but then the program needed 5 hours to do what gawk could do in less than 20 min.). To be forced to declare the dimension of the array beforehand put me off of C/C++/Java. One of the reason I adopted Revolution is that I can construct a GUI (which awk cannot) and still index my array with a string and don't have to know, in advance, the approximate number of index values I will need (I was turning to Python and wxPython just before I learned about Revolution).
I had been poundering on that question before... why not merge Revolution with Awk? Awk/Gawk is very small (200KB) and is the best program I know to rapidly handle text (with rapid processing of string-indexed arrays of huge size and fully fledge regular expression syntax). Revolution is the best program I know to rapidly handle interface design and internet protocols. Marielle >This BZ on arrays would be a welcome enhancement, but it would not >improve the speed of processing arrays. I was thinking along the >lines of a high speed array processing instruction subset. They >would be less flexible than what we have now --the nice flexible data >types, dynamic memory allocation, and flexible key names are what >costs the operators so much time to execute. Just let me define the >dimensions and data size for a fixed memory allocation and provide >operators that work on fixed data types. It should fly through the >array calculations at least ten times faster. I just entered a BZ >request for it. If you agree, vote. BZ# 2813 _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution