Re: A Record Interpretation of an Array

["Mark" <up.yerz@nospam.com>]

"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3B12C9E0.5E9B06C8@earthlink.net...

>
> (In case someone asks, "What problem are you actually trying to solve
> here?"  The answer is, to manipulate an array via a record-oriented
> approach.  I have a lot of code that does varied and sundry things with
> record definitions, and by considering an array as a degenerate case of
> a record (the fields are all of the same, rather than different, types),
> I can reuse that code to do the exact same kinds of things to arrays
> that I already do to records.)

OK, then it seems like what you Really Want To Do :-) is to decouple your
algorithms from data representations.  This can be done in very lightweight
ways, and the result is something that is absolutely clear in its intent and
does not depend upon any unchecked programming or other monkey business.

The idea is "abstract, then fulfill the abstractions" as opposed to "pretend
it's something else that is equivalent."

How about an example?  Can you put up some code for some of the "varied and
sundry things" that you would like to be able to reuse, and then we can see
how that might be rewritten to be reusable?(The coercion approach seems like
an attempt to reuse stuff that was not written to be reusable in the first
place).

Mark Lundquist