Jim Lawrence (AccessD)
accessd at shaw.ca
Sat Feb 21 17:30:01 CST 2004
Hi Jürgen: Your back! Good to see you, email-wise again. Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Jürgen Welz Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 9:53 AM To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: [AccessD] Array dimensions, Row - Col or Col Row Pet peeve - Microsoft documentation and book authors that insist that the the first dimension of 2 dimensional array is the row and the second is the column. I see that this carries over into the .Net books I'm reading. When was the last time you used a Recordset .getRows method and had the first index refer to the record and the second to the field? When was the last time you redimensioned an array to add a column rather than to add or remove a number of rows (records)? How often does a table/query change in size as to the number of rows (records) in comparison to the number of columns (fields)? It doesn't really matter which it is, but with the old versions of VB/A, you could only resize the last index of a multi-dimensioned array (without copying to a new array anyway) so the only practical usage is to add rows to a fixed number of columns which is in fact how it was implemented. Then the authors (Dianne Zak for example) and even Microsoft help deliberately explain them to be varArray(RowIndex, ColIndex) when in the actual practical implementation it is nearly always (ColIndex, RowIndex). It doesn't matter which it is because it is really just an abstract data structure that you can in theory map as you please. The problem I have is when documentation insists on defining it in an impractical manner in the context of getrows and other database usage making it obvious that the VB data people didn't speak with the VB language people. I had hoped that by .Net they would have a chance to write new documentation and finally get it right but I've been reading the Sybex Maastering Visual Basic .NET Database Programming, Visual Basic .NET Developer's Handbook and Mastering Visual Basic .NET and Evangelos Petroutsos keeps right on defining it backwards when he could have just shut up. Why is it that within a single company and a single development platform, developers insist on driving on different sides of the road? Is there a means to lodge a complaint with Microsoft so that the next time they replace the entire language they might finally get the documentaion consistent? Ciao Jürgen Welz Edmonton, Alberta jwelz at hotmail.com _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus&pgmarket=en-ca&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin .msn.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket%3den-ca _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com