Hashes of Arrays, who'd have 'em

Originally Posted by 2mths

No idea what about FIFO structures (I can work out what it stands for but that's not helping) so looping is all I've got.

As you've worked out, FIFO == First In First Out. Basically, pick one end of the array to add things to, and only remove things from the other end of the array. Doesn't matter if this is the "bottom" of the array, but it's usually easier that way.

Originally Posted by timwilky

You them move into things like java collections and arrays etc. But now you no longer have those nice pointers that allowed you to do fancy tricks, like stepping through arrays etc using pointer arithmetic.

Java actually does support pointer arithmetic (as of Java 1.5). The only thing you can't do is uninitialise an object (though you can finalize() which is tantamount to the same thing really), and you can't deallocate memory.

Originally Posted by 2mths

Data set returned along line of...

Day Production Line Qty
2

So you have an array of arrays, the the outer being columns, the inner being specific row data?

Nah I posted again without meaning to (bloody annoying - not sure what I'm doing)

Basically at one point I wanted an Array of Arrays (for one type of graph), then changed my mind and went back to wanting a Hash of Arrays to produce separate graphs (by looping round the keys and using making a simple array of (2) arrays on each loop).

I've done a ****e job of explaining it, not helped my mis-posting twice. I'll look at it tomorrow.

Basically my problem is syntax and in there I'm not helped by not understanding things like references.

Originally Posted by Luckypants

AKA a queue to us oldies.

Ah, but a specific queue.

For example, Pringles are arranged into a "queue" - in that you have to get one (or a group) out first, but those you pull out were among the last in the container.

[timwilky]

queues are nice things to work with when you start to add functionality to insert into queues, delete from queue, service the first member, last member etc.

You end up with structures that contain pointers to the previous member, next member of the queue, plus either a pointer to the data item or if a privative type that data item. In that way, you can end up coding a whole structure to implement stacks (simple push/pop) for a LIFO implementation. or your FIFO. You then need to build a good enumerator round it to efficiently walk the queue.

Mike, I think of a queue (from above), as more than a FIFO as there is a lot more you can do with it. my best analogy of a FIFO is in a pipe implementation, there is only two methods involved to insert something to the tail end of a pipe and extract something from the head end of the pipe.

Baph
Thanks for the heads up re pointer functionality of 1.5. I must admit I have not read the spec, and tend to still think 1.2/1.3 with some added extra class implementations