Three Dimensional Array Question

[Tornados]

Advice on three dimensional array (difficult?)
(posted earlier in programming .. no reply yet)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello, with two dimensions i seem to be able to do everything i want..
yet when they become three, things get more complicated. Please adivce
on the following matters:

I have an array that contains two kinds of values , these values occur
often and for each row i want the third dimension to act...so:

array(0 to 999, 0 to 1, 0 to 10) ' for example 11 rows, 1000 hits and 2
fields

then everytime something changes in column A from one of the 10 rows i
want to add this number to the array in the right dimension and
accordingly show the average of all values that have changed in the
column A of the specific row.

1st i would like to know what the memory wise best way is to do this...
it could be that there are 10 changes in row 1 (dimension 1) and 4
changes in row 2 (dimension 2).. How do i find the no of entries in the
dimensions? if i understand correctly all dimension will have the same
amount of elements .. so how do i get a correct average of these? I
made it to work with two dimensions and to check which row it is yet i
want it in 3 dimensions.


ie:
For x = 0 To ubound(array,1)
SUM = SUM + array(x, 2, row)
Next x
' will it be best then to check everytime whether an element has a
value and then only add it?

2nd is it best to reserve memory in advance for an estimated amount of
hits (999) in the example or make a dynamic one and redim each time an
update occurs.

3rd and finally, is it only possible to refer to a dimension with a
number or can it be text.. if for example i want to convert a text to a
number can the array handle for example dimension 1500 when the rest is
empty?

Tx! tornado

 

[Gary's Student]

These are only general comments, PCs vary with regard to both available
memory and processor speed:

1. Checking for zero in the x-loop will both add code and possibly slow the
code.
2. The same is true for dynamic allocation of memory. If your computer has
the memory, then allocate the array and don't redim.
3. I haven't gotten an array to index from a string variable, but it may
still be possible.