Being from the late 70's MCD crowd, I recall learning EXTRACT, INSERT,
DELETE and REPLACE functions for dynamic arrays. The fact that READ
co-existed with MATREAD begs some analysis on why there would be 2 methods
to get data from a data file.
In my travels through thousands of lines of code from
Charles Stevenson says:
[snipped a bunch of good stuff]
If you have a program that manipulates many attributes many times, then
it makes sense to matread them into a dimensioned array up front, and
matwrite them in the end, thereby limiting big string manipulations.
People forget or newbies don't
Charles Stevenson goes on:
[snipping the bit about tolerance]
Do you know why dimensioned arrays were first limited to only 1 or 2
dimensions in Pick or Info-Basic?
There was probably some concern about memory consumption way back when MD
and Pick ran with only 64KB of core. I think it was just
