Suggestions for Maintaining "Object" State?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg78331] Suggestions for Maintaining "Object" State?
- From: "Carey Sublette" <careysub at earthling.net>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:32:26 -0400 (EDT)
I am starting to develop a fairly complex simulation using Mathematica 6 and am confronting a basic issue that I am unsure how best to resolve: "How to preserve the state of an object?" Physical objects represented in a simulation have internal state that is preserved and affects how they respond to stimulus from the simulation environment. Possible ways of implementing this behavior includes creating modules representing objects and: * exporting state to the session (or other enclosing scope) as a list of values, which either exists as a global variable or is passed in as a parameter; * using UpValues or Tags to assign object state to symbols(?). At the moment the objects in the simulation have a 1-to-1 relationship, there is only one of each type, which simplifies the problem, though in the future I may need to maintain state for multiple objects of the same type. Does anyone have recommendations for how to do this, optimized either for convenience or efficiency?