cmt@tybalt.caltech.edu (Rich Siegel c/o Etoyoc) (11/11/86)
[ EAT ME RAW!!! Line Eater!!! ] [ I am posting this for a friend who is unable to post to the ] [ evolving net at this time. All replies should be routed to ] [ him or the net. He still can read. Enjoy... ] I am working on a plotting program for the Macintosh, and I've chosen Pascal as my language, because I don't know C, and while the implementation of Fortran on the Macintosh offers superior floating-point speed over any other Macintosh language, Fortran's too clumsy for me to work with in this case. I have chosen to use a linked list to hold my data, because it offers flexibility to expand to hold a nearly unlimited amount of data. What bothers me is that accessing the data in this list is kind of slow; it takes twice as long to load the data into the linked list as it did to load the data into an array. Is there any way that I can combine the flexibility of a linked list with the speed of an array? I've had some ideas; for example, a pointer on the Macintosh can be made to point to a block of arbitrary size, and this size can be changed. Perhaps if I load the values, dynamically change the block size, and whenever I want to get an indexed value, calculate the address? I know the size of a number (10 bytes), so maybe that wouldn't be too difficult.... Any suggestions? --Rich rs4u@andrew.cmu.edu