Ed Leafe wrote:
On Sep 27, 2006, at 9:26 AM, Vince Teachout wrote:
For me, it's tryiing to wrap my head around lists, dictionaries and
splitting.
Do you grok a VFP cursor? Each record is a set of values
identified by column name, right? And a cursor is nothing more that a
zero-to-many collection of such records.
A dictionary is a set of values identified by key name - exactly
the same as a record. And a list is just like an Fox array; if the
elements in that list happen to be dictionaries with the same
structures... well, then you have yourself a VFP cursor!
What I recall being frustrating was THINKING I understood slicing, and
then trying to predict what the result of a particular slice would be.
Something along the lines of "foobar[1,2] should give me the letter
'A'", and then getting back a P, or a OOBAR or something. (that's
widely paraphrasing from something I recall from several months ago, not
a real example)
It's been about 4 months since I last looked at it, so I'll have to look
at it again with the VFP cursor idea in mind. Thanks.
Actually, if you think about it, it makes things simpler. You
don't need to use any of those things if you don't need them. The core
of the language is free of all those largely unneeded extras. However,
when you *do* need them, you just add an 'import' statement, and you
have all of the power of that module available to you.
Sorry, I failed to be clear in what I meant. It's daunting in the sense
of a Newbie Windows user coming over to Linux and asking "which distro
should I use?" They're are a lot of libs, and some overlap in
functionality, so which is "the best?" Once past that initial awe,
it's pretty darn cool, because you can be sure that whatever you want to
do, *somebody* has probably written a lib for it. For example, without
looking, I would be willing to bet five dollars that there is a library
with MP3 functions.
Contrast that with VFP, where everything is in the same namespace.
When was the last time you used @SAY/GET code? How about all those
DDE* commands? Or all the Macintosh-specific commands? Wouldn't it
make more sense to factor that stuff out into separate modules, and
only use them when they are needed? Instead, you have all that junk
floating around in the core of the language.
The only drawback with that is sometimes you want to use Library X, and
when you try to use it, you find X needs C, and C needs A. But I'm
talking from a very limited exposure here, and that doesn't seem to come
up often as a topic of discussion, so I assume that it's not really a
major issue.
Hmmmm...... I think it's time to download the latest version again!
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