Thank you sir, that is what I have been suspecting.
I expect that these names become pointers to memory locations, and since the
assignments are dynamic, there is no easy way to get their locations unless
you build your own array that points to them.
And that must be why you are prevented from building a name to a reference,
because the compiler would have no way to predict which reference you are
going to build. (Unless they programmed it to do it! With a minor memory
and speed penalty of course.)
//Start Minor Rant//
It's not very Visual, and it's not very Basic, though.
As a newcomer to this language, I have been tempted to hunt up a copy of VB6
for this reason, because the few applications I will write are intended to
get a job done, and this job will be most quickly done by designing the
screens once, and writing values into labels many times (something that is
pretty basic to most tasks).
The language is getting in my way.
I don't believe the language couldn't have a generic replacement for the
automatically generated control arrays I have read so much about in VB6
without breaking the OOP dot net religion. Thousands of coders spending
thousands of hours to do the same task, when it could be fixed once in the
program itself. All they would have to do is give a choice whether to use
the automatically generated one, or build your own. They save a hundred man
hours in design, it costs their userbase thousands and thousands of man
hours.
I don't care about portability to other operating systems. I don't care
about OOP. I just need a tool to get a job done so I can go back to
designing machines, designing circuits, programming machine controls, and
running a maintenance department for a factory. I like strong datatypes,
nice interface to networking and file operations, and standard Windows
controls, that is what got me to try this language after learning the basics
of several others. I don't even need multi threading, except for the
'blocking' behavior thing with sockets. All the other simple languages I
looked at either tried to hide datatypes so I couldn't work on bytes, or
couldn't do TCP, or didn't have bit shift instructions (I got around that,
try doing CRC calcs without them sometime) or generally had some other huge
stumbling block.
I can get past the stumbling block of needing to go through a bunch of mumbo
jumbo to write text into a box on the user's screen. It's just a speed
bump. But it is very irritating.
My problem is that I know too much and too little. I can write assembler
for cpu's and I can implement database type operations in ladder logic
PLC's, and can design and implement hardwired digital logic circuits. My
own rule for designs is, "No Ambiguity For The User". But it gets deep for
me when I get into instatiations of inherited methods of properties of
classes and
my.overloaded.namespace.isitanoperator.isitakeywor d.isitabuiltinfunction.itisambiguous.tryeverypossi bleiteration._
ItsNamedTheSameIsItTheOneInTheFormOrTheOneInMemory .WhatIsItsState.GoogleItForHours
I know what the processor has to do to time slice operations. I have pretty
good idea what it has to do to keep track of memory addresses and implement
commands. It's just not very well explained how all this takes place with
the tools you get. I grew up with programming manuals that were very
explicit, so this seems like a religion of memorization of arbitrary rules
that have fuzzy boundaries.
//End Of Rant//
Thank you for your patience and your insight and your wise advice. It was
generous of you to take the time to respond and I do know the value of that,
and I appreciate it. I am now off to finish my control array logic. I did
get communications to the industrial black box working, CRC and all, now I
just need to show the user what I got from the box.
Maybe when I get it done I'll write a newcomer's guide on How To Write Text
Variables Into Large Numbers Of Static Labels On Several Screens.
--NinerSevenTango--
"Cor Ligthert [MVP]" <no************@planet.nl> wrote in message
news:uL***************@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
Hi,
You would have to understand the difference between a scripting language
and a build (compiled language) (exe or dll)
A scripting language uses all your names at runtime, it is not precompiled
every statement is everytime compiled completely from source to machine
code.
A build language renames all your mnemonic (names) to a for the computer
better usable code (in debug format it holds those names to show them).
The advandce of a build language is simple that it is smaller, less easy
to reuse for others, and process faster.
Cor