Welcome m'lord. Arrays confused me also in my early AMOS programming days. Ultimately I did come to understand and even love them.
An array is simply a way to store many related variables in one single place. For instance, say I have a game with 4 players and each one has an energy level 0-100. I can create an array to store all their energy levels together for easy access:
Dim ENERGY(4)
At the start of the game I then set all 4 player's energy to 100, we start counting with 0:
ENERGY(0)=100
ENERGY(1)=100
ENERGY(2)=100
ENERGY(3)=100
Now, during the game I can add or subtract energy using normal arithmetic, I just use the array name and the player number:
Rem This subtracts 15 energy points from player 0
ENERGY(0) = ENERGY(0) - 15
Print ENERGY(0)
So that's pretty much it.
You can also create arrays that act like grids. These are called 2 dimensional arrays and can be useful for tracking pieces on a board game like chess or battleship. You create one of these arrays by using Dim with more than one number in the parentheses:
Rem A 2D array
Dim CHESSBOARD(8,8)
Then you can access the value (that might indicate which pieces is at a given point on the board) like so:
Rem Find the piece located at row 4, column 7.
PIECE = CHESSBOARD(4,7)
Remember to always start counting row and columns at 0.
You can have as many dimensions in an array as you want, so a 3D array would be like a cube:
Dim CUBE(10,10,10)
Higher dimensions can also be used, but can be difficult to visualize. Anyway, I hope this helps a little. If not, let me know and I'll try to explain it differently.
And again, welcome!
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Topic: New to Amos Pro, looking to start *simple* programming in A.P (Read 8649 times)