Referencing Nested Sequences
- Posted by pblonner at optushome.com.au Jun 07, 2003
- 560 views
I am new to Euphoria but find it an exciting language. One point that bothers me however is as follows - * to access a sequence nested in a sequence you must make the full "path" reference each time if you are to change any values You can not simply copy a reference to the inner sequence - otherwise a copy of the entire sequence would be made. e.g for i = 1 to 10 do nested[9][3][i] = 0 end for if it done as SubList = nested[9][3] for i = 1 to 10 do SubList[i] = 0 end for The latter causes a new list to be made - which is not what I want When the subscripts are CONSTANTS it would be so much more readable to access the inner element without the full "PATH" This is also the same when passing the Sub Sequence as a parameter to a function. This would be convenient for writing generic sub-functions without them knowing how the sub-sequence was accesses In summary it seems that I am forces to accept a significant reduction to efficiency and less readability to write the code I intend. Not also that although I know 'C' pointers would solve this, I would not want pointers. Rather I would like a "shorthand" way to access the inner elements - I would like that interpreter to handle "shorthand" refereneces without the performance loss of copying entire sequences