At 18:54 -0700 06/12/2002, Buzz Kettles wrote:
>At 11:06 AM -0500 6/12/02, you wrote:
>>If you wanted to I suppose you could convert the list to a string,
>>then correct the spelling of the flooey term, then pass the list
>>through a value filter again. I don't know if that would be faster
>>or not but it might be the way I'd go about doing it.
>
>at least an order of magnitude slower.
>
>please repeat after me ...
>"text conversion of lists is a very, very slow operation"
I know that. This would be why I mentioned ... it would be ... slower.
I was thinking about lists that have to have their props accessed in
a fashion like this one:
put lSomeList[3][#insert][2]
-- [ #point1: [ 1, 2, 5 ] ]
As you might infer such a list could be relatively complicated.
Rather than take the risk of fouling something like that up terribly,
to me it makes much more sense to convert it to text and look for the
bad word or words, then replace them and reconvert. There's *no
chance* then of inserting something in the wrong place, or trying to
access a property that doesn't exist, or dealing with the duplicate
issue Robert mentioned.
Lists are great but they are *fragile* in that sense. One bad call
and you have script errors whining about voids. It takes *many orders
of magnitude more* time to correct that than it does to deal with
list --> string --> list conversion.
Please repeat after me...
"Searching and editing text is considerably more stable than dealing
with possible problems inherent in modifying deeply-nested proplists."
Here is my corollary to that.
"Users don't appreciate speed gains if they have to deal with script
error dialogs."
--
Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/
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Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide
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