for my next trick, staring into the sun

Hi and Welcome

So. Multidimensional arrays. Well.

See, I thought hell was classes. No. Hell was functions? No. Is hell, in fact, a two dimensional array? Actually, no.

Hell is a book that acts like they are just two arrays brought together magically.

Starting on Friday, through midnight Sunday, I suffered under the delusion that all I had to do was create two arrays, then bring them together with magic. Like this.

table[array1][array2]

Voila! Your work here is done. Or so the book says.

And I'm sure in some universe--the example in the book, say--that works. You might be surprised to know I cried, considered drowning myself, and opened up The Erdős–Faber–Lovász conjecture to stare at (speaking of, I'm still not sure why two people can't just belong to one committee period, because that would short circuit that entire issue right off the bat). And let me tell you, when working on unsolved graphing problems you don't even understand is preferable to spending any amount of time looking at your two dimensional array? You have reached hell.

(Seriously. Why can't two people work only one committee? I'm also weirded out by the fact the entire thing really looks neat if it's k chairs, k people and k+1 committees. I don't even know what that means but the graph has four colors and is deeply, deeply awesome and also congruent, which satisfies the small part of me that likes everything to be balanced. I ended up trying to do it three dimensionally but again, no toothpicks. I also gave the people names. Perhaps off my flist. It was more fun that way).

But you know what's so much easier than both of these? Treat the fucker like an address.

table[rows][columns]

I keep going back to read the book and they just do not even imply that. They don't! They initialize it, or enter data from it, but nowhere does it say, "Oh, by the way. Please don't take this literally. This is an address." An address. A pointer, though not officially, if you will. You don't have to create an array to take your data before hand! No, this one can do it all on its own!

One. Line. Would. Have. Saved. My. Sanity.

The only comfort I have atm is that the average grade on this is very low so far. Still have searching the char array to do (Pretty sure this isn't going well; my first attempt last night ended up with strange results that might be, oh, crazy) and organizing the data. Yeah.

I always wondered about people who said they could pass a class easily and never learn anything. It scares me that it's very possible without a lab practical, which makes me wonder why on earth there isn't one for this.

I wish there were other news, but really. Really close to writing a sternly worded letter to the book person to use examples that are, say, clearer. Using the Angry Snail Icon of Anger.