LabVIEW
How does Array Subset work?
Ravens Fan wrote:...
Ben, Dennis,
Out of curiosity, what is the largest N for an N-dimension array you've ever used whether in LV or any programming language? Would you ever have gotten to the shelf or aisle level? What would come after building? Street?
I did not write but did touch an app that was orignally developed by the owner of my company (he was the first non-NI person certified to teach LabVIEW) and was/is being used to evaluate the quality of windsheilds to measure the Transmision, Reflectance, and Internal Distortion (TRIDA). Since he was scanning in 3-space and glass is anisotropic (? different propeties in different directions) I think he used at least a 5d array. But that was written back in LV 2.1 or 3 so the science was new.
I think it was Jim Kring that once posted that higher dimension arrays have no real meaning and we were not able to counter his point. For the app listed above I probaly would have used a 3d array of clusters but I don't remeber all of the math that was involved so I'm only speculating now. 
Now for my personal largest feasco!
Before LV 6 we did not have property nodes but I had an app that really needed something like property nodes. It also needed variant data types but those also did not exist. So I invented my own scheme that used VI Server and a set of generic action engines that provided the interconectivity I needed. I was pleased with the preliminary testing because it was robust to the point that I could develop new components for the application and deploy them WHILE the app was running (Had to wait for LVOOP to get an offical version of that).
But the problem was...
I used a 3d array of strings to handle the invocation of methods and the data shared between them. Since arrays have to be rectangular, the storage requirements for the data space grew at a rate of N^3 ( as soon as I saw it try to scale up, I realized my error).
So we threw the whole thing away and re-wrote the whole thing from scratch. It took me years to claw my way out of that hole since my boss had to eat the loss or about 3 months of my labor.
If nothing else the above story should explain "Why is Ben so fixated on performance and memory use?"
Burned once twice wery (sp?)
Ben
