Thoughts for the evening

So I tried "adapting" some of the examples for Flash into a pseudocode form, and as usual, everything I do points out the holes in my plan. Then I go walk the dog, and possible solutions occur. Today's harvest:

The sokoban example from the gazbming is rather oddly written; he defines some functions to create tiles and sprites, then creates 200 wall tiles, a bunch of package tiles, and so on. Then to build a map, he moves the tiles in Actionscript (and the maps are encoded in the Actionscript).

So fine. I can imagine writing a macro that expresses the map encodings as Actionscript, but really those 200 wall tiles are a map. I don't want to create them with Perl (though I could), because normally I'm not running Perl at define time, only building code snippets and running them after start. Maybe I could rethink that, but in this case, it seems more elegant to express the 200 wall tiles as a map from a sequence (from=1, to=200) through a template into a series of macro-inserted structures.

Now, this begs the question as to what, really, a map is. I've been going on the presumption that it's a nodal structure thing - but in this case, conceptually, I'm mapping from a sequence onto a series of nodes. I can imagine the same thing with a set of row data. Now, in the case of a sequence (which is immutable) this is a one-way trip. If I map to data, it's ... maybe not a one-way trip, but I probably have to define explicitly how the data should be updated if the nodal structure is changed, and certainly something like this is probably one-way.

But the point is, semantically, this is a map. Just because it's not my two-way nodal structure doesn't mean I shouldn't still call it a map.

Oy. You want to do something simple, define a new programming paradigm and a language to go with it, and revolutionize the world, and then it's just one thing and another.