Should everything **really** fit on one screen?

[AristosQueue (NI)]

I should probably make a slight amendment to my earlier style declaration... that would be, "If you're a beginner, new to LabVIEW, yes, everything should fit on one screen." It is very much like writing English papers. You should never use a sentence fragment. That's the rule, but many writers make good use of sentence fragments. Essentially, once you have the feel for the language, you can stretch it in ways that are plausible but not necessarily definable in explicit rules. What makes this larger-than-screen VI ok and this other one a disaster? It comes down to readability and editability: how easy is it for someone else to read the diagram and how much contortion is required to fit the "one screen" principle.

[Ben]

Aristos wrote "It is very much like writing English papers. You should never use a sentence fragment. That's the rule, but many writers make good use of sentence fragments. "

AGREED! Hermin Melville (sp?) excepted*.

Ben

* I have never read Moby Dick but I have been told that there is a single sentance that runs on for a page and a half.

[Evan R.]

Thanks all for your great suggestions. I definitely like the Cluster with message name / variant data. Message name could even be an enum to avoid silly mistakes like typos.

[Ben]

Please be aware that the variant data type could invoke additional data copies so keep that in mind if the data be passed is large.

Ben

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Replied to wrong post.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

A run-on sentence is not a sentence fragment. Duh. The aforementioned "duh" is a fragment. A run-on sentence is properly a sentence but one that continually appends more and more and more text generally through the use of extensions known to English majors as clauses, which may be joined using any number of conjunctions (including but not limited to "and," "or," and "yet") or nesting of parenthetical expressions (such as the one earlier in this sentence (or the one you are reading now)), but which some how never manage to actually lead to a grammatically incorrect sentence construction.

Mellville is good. But no one beats James Joyce in Ulysses: one sentence... between 40 and 62 pages depending upon typesetting.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Also be aware that any place that you are using variants you can generally achieve significantly better performance using a hierarchy of LabVIEW classes. Variants should be used only when you truly have no idea what type of data you'll be handling.

[justin.goeres]

So do you prefer your clauses by-value, or by-reference?

[Ben]

Re: "A run-on sentence ... incorrect sentence construction."

So do we agree that if your VI diagrams reads like the graphic version of Ulysses, then you should concider using sub-VIs?

Ben

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Either consider subVIs or consider sending it to a museum as art. It still has value without subVIs, but perhaps not *engineering* value. 😉