"Chris R" <car### [at] comcastnet> wrote:

> I am going to keep using dictionaries, because I think the syntax is more
> natural to me, and I don't have to keep track of index positions within an
> array.  But, is there any practical advantage to using a mixed array over a
> dictionary?  Or is it just a matter of personal syntactic taste?

I can't speak for anyone but myself -

For a while, all we had were standard arrays that only accepted a single data
type.
Then Jaap Frank discovered that if you had several arrays of different types,
those could be packaged into a single array, because doing it in that 2-step
process fooled POV-Ray and gave you an array of arrays, even though it was
functionally the same as a mixed array.

Then we got dictionaries, and jr was happy.

The end.

:)

Actually, I often use mixed arrays as a sort of parameter input for macros, so
having a mixed array helps.
Also, for the longest time we didn't have tuple-style variable assignment, and
so passing multiple values out of arrays was problematic.   I would (ab)use
vectors for that, or use the array of arrays workaround, but mixed arrays makes
passing a wide variety of results of different data types much easier.

- BW

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