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2.7 Dimension Lists
You should strive to write Yorick programs in such a way that you never
need to refer to the lengths of array dimensions. Array dimensions are
usually of no direct significance in a calculation; your programs will
tend to be clearer if only the arrays themselves appear.
In practice, unfortunately, you can't always get by without mentioning
dimension lengths. Two functions are important:
- numberof(x)
- returns the total number of items in the array x.
- dimsof(x)
- returns a list consisting of the number of dimensions of the array x,
followed by the length of each of those dimensions. Thus, if x were
a nine-by-two-by-six array, dimsof(x) would return [3,9,2,6],
while if x were a scalar value, dimsof(x) would return
[0].
- dimsof(x, y, z, ...)
- With multiple arguments, the dimsof function returns the dimension
list of the array x+y+z+..., or [] if the input arrays are not
conformable.
The array function (see section 2.1 Creating Arrays), and the more arcane
functions add_variable, add_member, and reshape all
have parameter lists ending with one or more "dimension list"
parameters. Each parameter in a dimension list can be either a scalar
integer value, representing the length of a single dimension, or a
list of integers in the format returned by dimsof to represent
zero or more dimensions. Several arguments can be used to build up
a complicated dimension list:
| x1 = array(0.0, 9, 2, 6); /* 9-by-2-by-6 array of 0.0 */
x2 = array(0.0, [3,9,2,6]); /* another 9-by-2-by-6 array */
x3 = array(0.0, 9, [0], [2,2,6]); /* ...and yet another */
flux= array(0.0, 3, dimsof(z), numberof(groups));
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In the final example, the flux might represent the three
components of a flux vector, at each of a number of positions z,
and for each of a number of photon energies groups. The first
dimension of flux has length three, corresponding to the three
components of each flux vector. The last dimension has the same length
as the groups array. In between are zero or more dimensions --
whatever the dimensions of the array of positions z.
By using the rubber index syntax (see section 2.3.7 Using a rubber index), you can extract
meaningful slices of the flux array without ever needing to know
how many dimensions z had, let alone their lengths.
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