How to Compare two arrays and its elements in visual foxpro? - arrays

I Am having two arrays named atest and NEWARRAY,I have tried to compare the elements of two arrays with simple if()and this is comparing only the first element of an array , how to compare all the array values at once,here's my code
IF (Alltrim(atest)== Alltrim(NEWARRAY))
Messagebox('Success',64,'Status')
Else
Messagebox('MisMatch',16,'Status')
ENDIF

Fox has a few functions that operate on whole arrays - like acopy, ascan and asort - but there is no built-in function that compares whole arrays. So you'll have to do the comparison element per element, for example with a for loop.
And yes, if you use an array name as an expression - including passing it by value - then you'll get the value of the first array element instead. There is one exception, though: when you pass an array to a built-in function in a place where an array parameter is expected then the compiler will automatically emit a reference token under the hood in order to arrange pass-by-reference instead of pass-by-value.
So, if you have a user-defined function f() to which you want to pass an array a then you need to call it like this: f(#m.a) but you can call built-in functions taking arrays like this: alen(a) (since the m. can be left off in this situation as well). In fact, Fox would complain if you coded something like alen(#m.a) or alen(#a), and older Foxen could even crash in such situations.
Conversely, if an array is the target of an assignment like a = 42 or store 42 to a then the value will be assigned to all array elements. This is convenient for initialising arrays to something like 0, '' or .null..
Hence, if you have two arrays a and b then a = b will assign the first value of b to all elements of a, and if a == b will compare the respective first cells only.
Sidenote: should you ever have to compare records from tables with equal or equivalent structure then you should remember to look up compobj(). It does for objects and scatter records what Fox won't do for arrays: it compares them whole-sale. That is, it compares the values of properties with matching names and tells you if there's a mismatch, and it does so much faster than hand-crafted code could do it.
Theoretically you could gather an array into a table/cursor record and then use scatter name Walther to produce a scatter record, which could then be compared to a scatter record named Herbert that was produced in a similar fashion from the contents of the other array: compobj(m.Walther, m.Herbert) would tell you whether the original arrays were equal or not. However, I'd be hard pressed to imagine circumstances where one might use something like that in production code...

You could create a simple procedure like this for comparison:
Procedure CompareArrays(ta1, ta2)
If Alen(ta1) != Alen(ta2)
Return .F.
EndIf
Local ix
For ix=1 to Alen(ta1)
If (Type('ta1[m.ix]') != Type('ta2[m.ix]') or ta1[m.ix] != ta2[m.ix])
Return .F.
endif
endfor
endproc
And pass your arrays by reference. ie:
isIdentical = CompareArrays(#laArr1, #laArr2)
If array members could hold objects, you should use compobj for comparison of array elements.

Related

Why does the type signature of linear array change compared to normal array?

I'm going through an example in A Taste of Linear Logic.
It first introduces the standard array with the usual operations defined (page 24):
Then suggests that a linear equivalent (using a linear logic for type signatures to restrict array copying) would have a slightly different type signature:
This is designed with the idea that array contains values that are cheap to copy but that the array itself is expensive to copy and thus should be passed along from use to use as a handle.
Question: The signatures for lookup and update correspond well to the standard signatures, but how do I interpret the signature for new?
In particular:
The function new does not seem to return an array. How can I get an array to use if one is not provided?
I think I do understand that Arr –o Arr x X is not derivable using linear logic and therefore a function to extract individual values without consuming the array is needed, but I don't understand why new doesn't provide that function directly
In practical terms, this is about garbage collection.
Linear logic avoids making copies as well as leaving unused values lying around. So when you create an array with new, you also need to make sure it's eventually cleaned up again.
How can you make sure it is cleaned up? Well, in this example they do it by not giving back the array as the result, but instead “lending” it to the caller. The function Arr ⊸ Arr ⊗ X must give an array back in the end, in addition to the result you're actually interested in. It's assumed that this will be a modified form of the array you started out with. Only the X is passed back to the caller, the Arr is deallocated.

getting column of array in C99?

In C if I have:
int grades[100][200];
and want to pass the first row, then I write: grades[0], but what if I want to pass first column? writing this won't help grades[][0]
You can't pass columns in C. You pass pointers to the beginning of some continuous data.
Rows in C are written continuously in memory, so you pass the pointer to the first element of some row (you do it implicitly by using its name: matrix[row]; an explicit version would be &matrix[row][0]), and you can use the row by iterating over the continuous memory.
To use columns, you need to pass the whole array (a pointer to the first element in the 2D array, actually), and pass also the length of the rows, and then the function has to jump that length to jump from an element of the same column to the next one. This is one of many possible solutions, you could develop any other solution, for example copying the column in a temporary array as some comment pointed out; but this one is commonly used in cblas functions for example.
If it helps to visualize, a 2-dimensional array is an array of arrays, it's not formulated as a matrix. Thereby, we can pass a sub-array (i.e., a row), but there's no direct way of passing a column.
One way to achieve this is to loop over the outer array, pick the element at the fixed location (mimicking the "column"), and use the values to create a separate array, or pass to function that needs to process the data.
Matrixes do not exist in C (check by reading the C11 standard n1570). Only arrays, and in your example, it is an array of arrays of int. So columns don't exist neither.
A good approach is to view a matrix like some abstract data type (using flexible array members ....) See this answer for details.
Consider also using (and perhaps looking inside its source code) the GNU scientific library GSL, and other libraries like OpenCV, see the list here.
In some cases, arbitrary precision arithmetic (with gmplib) could be needed.

Why [1:2] != Array[1:2]

I am learning Julia following the Wikibook, but I don't understand why the following two commands give different results:
julia> [1:2]
1-element Array{UnitRange{Int64},1}:
1:2
julia> Array[1:2]
1-element Array{Array,1}:
[1,2]
Apologies if there is an explanation I haven't seen in the Wikibook, I have looked briefly but didn't find one.
Type[a] runs convert on the elements, and there is a simple conversion between a Range to an Array (collect). So Array[1:2] converts 1:2 to an array, and then makes an array of objects like that. This is the same thing as why Float64[1;2;3] is an array of Float64.
These previous parts answer answered the wrong thing. Oops...
a:b is not an array, it's a UnitRange. Why would you create an array for A = a:b? It only takes two numbers to store it, and you can calculate A[i] basically for free for any i. Using an array would take an amount of memory which is proportional to the b-a, and thus for larger arrays would take a lot of time to allocate, whereas allocation for UnitRange is essentially free.
These kinds of types in Julia are known as lazy iterators. LinSpace is another. Another interesting set of types are the special matrix types: why use more than an array to store a Diagonal? The UniformScaling operator acts as the identity matrix while only storing one value (it's scale) to make A-kI efficient.
Since Julia has a robust type system, there is no reason to make all of these things arrays. Instead, you can make them a specialized type which will act (*, +, etc.) and index like an array, but actually aren't. This will make them take less memory and be faster. If you ever need the array, just call collect(A) or full(A).
I realized that you posted something a little more specific. The reason here is that Array[1:2] calls the getindex function for an array. This getindex function has a special dispatch on a Range so that way it "acts like it's indexed by an array" (see the discussion from earlier). So that's "special-cased", but in actuality it just has dispatches to act like an array just like it does with every other function. [A] gives an array of typeof(A) no matter what A is, so there's no magic here.

Apply slicing to array valued function in Fortran [duplicate]

How does one access an element of an array that is returned from a function? For example, shape() returns an array of integers. How does one compare an element of that array to an integer? The following does not compile:
integer :: a
integer, dimension(5) :: b
a = 5
if (a .eq. shape(b)) then
print *, 'equal'
end if
The error is:
if (a .eq. shape(c)) then
1
Error: IF clause at (1) requires a scalar LOGICAL expression
I understand that this is because shape(c) returns an array. However, accessing an element of the array does not appear to be possible like so: shape(c)(1)
Now if I add these two lines:
integer, dimension(1) :: c
c = shape(b)
...and change the if clause to this:
if (a .eq. c(1)) then
... then it works. But do I really have to declare an extra array variable to hold the return value of shape(), or is there some other way to do it?
Further to the answers that deal with SHAPE and logical expressions etc, the general answer to your question "How does one access an element of an array that is returned from a function?" is
you assign the expression that has the function reference to an array variable, and then index that array variable.
you use the expression that has the function reference as an actual argument to a procedure that takes a dummy array argument, and does the indexing for you.
Consequently, the general answer to your last questions "But do I really have to declare an extra array variable to hold the return value of shape(), or is there some other way to do it?" is "Yes, you do need to declare another array variable" and hence "No, there is no other way".
(Note that reasonable optimising compilers will avoid the need for any additional memory operations/allocations etc once they have the result of the array function, it's really just a syntax issue.)
The rationale for this particular aspect of language design is sometimes ascribed to a need to avoid syntax ambiguity and confusion for array function results that are of character type (they could potentially be indexed and/or substringed - how do you tell what was intended?). Others think it was done this way just to annoy C programmers.
Instead of using shape(array), I would use size(array).
Note that this will return an integer indicating how many elements there are in ALL dimensions, unless you specify the DIM attribute, in which case it will return only the number of elements in the specified dimension.
Take a look at the gfortran documentation:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/SIZE.html.
Also, look up lbound and ubound.
Note that the expression
a == shape(b)
returns a rank-1 array of logicals and the if statement requires that the condition reduce to a scalar logical expression. You could reduce the rank-1 array to a scalar like this:
if (all(a == shape(b)))
This is certainly not a general replacement for the syntactically-invalid application of array indexing to an array-returning function such as shape(b)(1).
It is possible even without the intermediate variable using ASSOCIATE:
real c(3,3)
associate (x=>shape(c))
print *,x(1),x(2)
end associate
end

MATLAB sum over all elements of array valued expression

So I've been wondering about this for a while now. Summing up over some array variable A is as easy as
sum(A(:))
% or
sum(...sum(sum(A,n),n-2)...,1) % where n is the dimension of A
However once it gets to expressions the (:) doesn't work anymore, like
sum((A-2*A)(:))
is no valid matlab syntax, instead we need to write
foo = A-2*A;
sum(foo(:))
%or the one liner
sum(sum(...sum(A-2*A,n)...,2),1) % n is the dimension of A
The one liner above will only work, if the dimension of A is fixed which, depending on what you are doing, may not necessary be the case. The downside of the two lines is, that foo will be kept in memory until you run clear foo or may not even be possible depending on the size of A and what else is in your workspace.
Is there a general way to circumvent this issue and sum up all elements of an array valued expression in a single line / without creating temporal variables? Something like sum(A-2*A,'-all')?
Edit: It differes from How can I index a MATLAB array returned by a function without first assigning it to a local variable?, as it doesn't concern general (nor specific) indexing of array valued expressions or return values, but rather the summation over each possible index.
While it is possible to solve my problem with the answer given in the link, gnovice says himself that using subref is a rather ugly solution. Further Andras Deak posted a much cleaner way of doing this in the comments below.
While the answers to the linked duplicate can indeed be applied to your problem, the narrower scope of your question allows us to give a much simpler solution than the answers provided there.
You can sum all the elements in an expression (including the return value of a function) by reshaping your array first to 1d:
sum(reshape(A-2*A,1,[]))
%or even sum(reshape(magic(3),1,[]))
This will reshape your array-valued expression to size [1, N] where N is inferred from the size of the array, i.e. numel(A-2*A) (but the above syntax of reshape will compute the missing dimension for you, no need to evaluate your expression twice). Then a single call to sum will sum all the elements, as needed.
The actual case where you have to resort to something like this is when a function returns an array with an unknown number of dimensions, and you want to use its sum in an anonymous function (making temporary variables unavailable):
fun = #() rand(2*ones(1,randi(10))); %function returning random 2 x 2 x ... x 2 array with randi(10) dimensions
sumfun = #(A) sum(reshape(A,1,[]));
sumfun(fun()) %use it

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