Re: nomenclature

[Phil Lawrence <prlawrence@Lehigh.EDU>]

Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> Gosh, I haven't seen that in years, and never not In Fortran. ;-)
>
> So you have an array whose first member is a string representing an
> array of keys and whose remaining members are the values associated
> with those keys?
Yep.

> You probably know that this is an error-prone structure (it can get
> out of sync), that it would normally be more readable and less buggy
> to use an array of key-value pairs.
The "flattened hash," right?  (To use Perl idiom.)

> But, assuming you know that and there's some pressing need to do the
> above, the answer to your question is that I don't know a name for
> such a structure.
Well, with the keys all pushed up to one end of the array, it reminds me 
of using a centrifuge.  How about "centrifugated hash"?  Opinions?  That 
would yield the function: "f_decentrifugate"   :-)


As for my reasons:

Normally, mod_plsql (Oracle Application Server) will take a URI like this:
 .../package_name.proc_name?x=1&y=2&z=3

and call my package_name.proc_name, defined like so:
  PROCEDURE proc_name
  (
    x  IN  table_name.x%TYPE  DEFAULT NULL
  , y  IN  table_name.y%TYPE  DEFAULT NULL
  , z  IN  table_name.z%TYPE  DEFAULT NULL
  )
  IS ...

However, I hate to hard code all those field names and types into the 
procedure definition, because they're likely to change, and anyway, 
wouldn't it be nice to do a generic procedure that can handle input from 
an HTML form of n elements?

Well, mod_plsql will supposedly (is documented to) allow "flexible 
parameter passing," i.e. it will note the "bang" in this URI:
 .../!package_name.proc_name?x=A%2CB%2CC&y=1&z=2

and then call my procedure with *2* parameters, instead of 3.  That 
would allow a procedure defined like so:
  PROCEDURE proc_name
  (
    name_array  IN  [array_type]
  , value_array IN  [array_type]
  )
  IS ...

But I can't get that to work, no way, no how.  (Anyone interested can 
contact me off list.  This is a real puzzler.)

So, it's work-around time.  mod_plsql is documented to (and actually 
will) take a URI like this:
  .../package_name.proc_name?x=1&x=2&x=3

and call my package_name.proc_name, defined like so:
  PROCEDURE proc_name
  (
    x  IN  owa_util.vc_arr
    -- from the owa_util source code (pubutil.sql):
    --   type vc_arr
    --     is table
    --     of varchar2(32000)
    --  index by binary_integer;
  )
  IS ...

At this point, x is basically an array with elements:  (1,2,3)

So...  that led me to use a URI like this:
  .../package_name.proc_name?x=A%2CB%2CC&x=1&x=2

obviously resulting in the array: ('A,B,C', 1, 2)

Phil
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