"

 COPYRIGHT (c) 1993 by Claus Gittinger

	      All Rights Reserved

 This software is furnished under a license and may be used

 only in accordance with the terms of that license and with the

 inclusion of the above copyright notice.   This software may not

 be provided or otherwise made available to, or used by, any

 other person.  No title to or ownership of the software is

 hereby transferred.

"

ArrayedCollection variableDoubleSubclass:#DoubleArray

       instanceVariableNames:''

       classVariableNames:''

       poolDictionaries:''

       category:'Collections-Arrayed'

!

!DoubleArray class methodsFor:'documentation'!

copyright

"

 COPYRIGHT (c) 1993 by Claus Gittinger

	      All Rights Reserved

 This software is furnished under a license and may be used

 only in accordance with the terms of that license and with the

 inclusion of the above copyright notice.   This software may not

 be provided or otherwise made available to, or used by, any

 other person.  No title to or ownership of the software is

 hereby transferred.

"

!

version

    ^ '$Header: /cvs/stx/stx/libbasic/DoubleArray.st,v 1.11 1995-11-11 14:31:28 cg Exp $'

!

documentation

"

    DoubleArrays store doubleFloats values (and nothing else).

    They have been added to support heavy duty number crunching somewhat

    better than other smalltalks do. 

    Storing Floats & Doubles in these objects (instead of Arrays)

    has some benefits:

    1) since the values are stored directly (instead of pointers to them)

       both access overhead and garbage collect overhead is minimized.

    2) they can be much faster passed to c functions (such as graphics 

       libraries or heavy duty math packages), since the double values

       come packed and can be used in C by using a (double *) or double[].

       There is no need to loop over the array extracting doubles.      

    3) they could (in theory) be much more easily be processed by things like

       vector and array processors

    Be aware however, that Float- and DoubleArrays are not supported in other

    smalltalks - your program will thus become somewhat less portable.

    (since their protocol is the same as normal arrays filled with floats,

     they can of course be easily simulated - a bit slower though)

    Also, they could be simulated by a ByteArray, using doubleAt: and 

    doubleAtPut: messages to access the elements, but that seems a bit

    clumsy and unelegant. Also, the stc-compiler may learn how to deal

    with Float- and DoubleArrays, making accesses very fast in the future.

    Of course, DoubleArray can be subclasses and named instance variables

    be added.

    See example uses in the GLX interface and GLDemos.

"

! !