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Alice is probably the wrong program
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DrJim
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Default Alice is probably the wrong program - 10-24-2008, 08:11 AM

Unless you must use Alice for this program, I'd suggest another approach. This is going to require quite a bit of string processing and a flexible array/list implementation - neither of which is an area Alice is strong in. In particular, there is no function to extract part of an existing string as a new string - which means your data will be separated into many small pieces that you then must keep track of.

Storing text information is also difficult and requires using the scripting option - which is problematic at best in Alice - but if you use that approach, why not use a scripting language (say Python) directly?

What you want to do also has been done in many "office" programs - Excel, Access, etc. - with excellent results and there are a lot of freeware programs out there also.

If - say for the 3D library or just interest in learning Alice/Java - you do want to stay with Alice, you are going to have to set up some sort of list/array structure to hold the data and then update the data via a separate user interface.

One thing to remember here is that any variable specifically associated with a method will be reset to the default once the method is run. If you want to keep it - you will either have to pass it back to the calling program (i.e., make the method a function) or write the value to a world level variable. The latter, in particular, is not good general programming practice but is the only option in Alice.

Last edited by DrJim; 10-24-2008 at 08:14 AM. Reason: Expanded answer
   
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