The current development versions of Yabasic don’t have the underlying implementation that I laid out above. So you can’t use, for example, print items("orangeJuice") or print a("b$") at the moment. I’ve been doing some work on a crit-bit tree implementation which will allow for this kind of thing to be added to Yabasic very simply; and, in fact, crit-bit trees will almost certainly become the primary underlying data structure used by Yabasic. Hopefully I will be able to get a basic development release with this functionality out before the end of February.

Oh, and I do plan to make the “$” suffix optional.

Feel free to ask more questions; I don’t mind at all!

Cheers.

Thanks for your answer on keys, I appreciate that, and can wait. [Sorry, missed that response until this morning.]

I look forward to being set straight in terms of syntax to deal with variable keys.

And, again, thanks for a good, solid Basic!

—Marty

First and foremost, thanks for extending yabasic in the direction of tables/associative arrays/hashes…. I’m playing with it in Linux (I don’t have an environment that I can compile source for in Windows).

I’m finding difficulty understanding what you’ve done here.

It looks soooo promising, but when I build it in linux, I can do ‘person.key$ = “value” ‘, but key$ isn’t a variable. This made sense from your code post providing an example. But if person.key$ is syntactic sugar for person(“key$”) = “value” – then I’d expect to be able to do it, but it provided me with a syntax error.

To make this “fully useful” – I see a need to have the contents of a variable be used as a key, and some way to get a list of the keys for a particular variable.

Is this there, and I just don’t understand? Or planned? Or am I missing something important.

Many thanks!

—Marty

PS: The kind of thing I’d look to do would be to store a file (say a .csv) as keys and values (say the first value of the .csv line is the key, and the rest of the line is the value). Store these in a table for quick access.

At some point, I’d like to retrieve these, but I need a way, for a given table, to get a list of the keys in the table.

It seems you are providing this functionality, but I’m not quite understanding how it works.

For:

#!/usr/bin/yabasic3

key$ = “54321″
value$ = “Bartels, Martin”

person.key$ = value$
print person.key$

key$ = “12345″
value$ = “Btfsplk, Joe”
person.key$ = value$

print person.key$

key$ = “54321″

print person.key$

rem person(“key$”) = “value”

rem print person.key$

——

I get:

Bartels, Martin
Btfsplk, Joe
Btfsplk, Joe

It would be more useful if key$ were interpreted as a variable. To that end, I attempted the remarked lines, but got “synax error at end of line”

If I’m misunderstanding how this is supposed to work, please correct me.

Many Thanks!

—MartyB

There will be a function, or some equivalent, to list the keys in a table. And, at this stage, the plan is for tables just to spring into existence when they are used for the first time; in other words, no variables will need to be predeclared—although, of course, local and static variables will have to be predeclared as such.

I hope that there will be some function provided to return a list of keys in a given table. Also, how will tables be declared (DIM? to what?)? Or will they just spring into existence when “an array” with a non-integer subscript (or a.b notation) is refereced?

I use perl a lot, but the most important feature is hashes.

Thanks! Yabasic is great, and is looking to become even better!