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A
Anonymous
November 6, 2014
Question

Can a HNA be used anywhere you'd use a regular array?

  • November 6, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 565 views

I'm going to use some very large numeric arrays for lookup tables and such. Can I substitute ASCII85 encoded homogeneous number arrays? The arrays will only be accessed with the get operator, and will contain 16 or 32 bit integers, or floating point numbers.

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1 reply

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
November 6, 2014

A homogeneous number array is a compact representation of an array. It is parsed once and then will have the same meaning and memory footprint as a regular array. How large is "very large"? There are limits on the number of elements in an array.

A more compact memory footprint for 16 or 32 bit numbers would be strings with packed numbers, since a single array element typically occupies 8 bytes.

A
Anonymous
November 6, 2014

Well that's how I thought it worked, but I can't get it to work. I either get Error: /undefined in ? (if I put cvx exec after it) or the interpreter seems to ignore the header and treats it as an encoded string (if I don't use exec). The array may contain several thousand numbers. For testing I tried a small array. I make a binary array starting with 149 32 00 78 followed by 78 16-bit values, then run that through /ASCII85Encode filter. I paste that into the source file and enclose it in <~ and ~>. So the interpreter should see that as ASCII85 encoded and decode it and have a regular array, right?

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
November 6, 2014

The interpreter should see that as an ASCII85 encoded string and decode it, giving you a string.

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