Have you ever seen a TV crime show where the detectives start a murder board, with pieces of evidence posted on a board connected by bits of twine, to help show a pattern or point to a suspect?
I think you need one for your data flow.
I suggest you learn to modularize your code through the use of value procedures and the avoidance of reliance on reading back label.text values into further calculations.
Learn to nest value procedure (function) calls.
Use procedure parameters to expose data flow.
Maxims to follow:
It's always wise
to modularize
If in doubt
rip it out
Also, don't be afraid to move things around if they are happening at the wrong time.
It is obvious to me that I am trying to create chicken salad with my chicken droppings of knowledge and the taste is just not quite right. You mentioned two lines of valuable information that I do not grock at all:
Learn to nest value procedure (function) calls. I have found nothing on the Internet regarding nesting of procedures and
Use procedure parameters to expose data flow. This takes me to my primary question. Is there any source of advance procedure applications? The only thing I found was this: Procedures
but it does not even come close to explaining what you did in the attached MIT file:
I can sort of follow the nomenclature of all of the procedure blocks but I could never assemble something like that from scratch without more thorough documentation than I have found so far. I am trying to understand the advantage of taking a relatively understandable formula like this:
and creating multiple procedural blocks, as I will not be using portions of the formula anywhere else. While I understand that you are a coding professional in this language and you tend to follow the "best practices" that you know (you should see my circuit breaker panels if you want a___-retentive wire art;), are there any advantages to me in making procedures that, for all intents and purposes, disguise the original formula with multiple layers of variables and partial expressions? It seems that procedures are best used when there are equations or short formulas that I would rather not repeat. If I am missing a "bigger picture" here please help me understand any other advantages of procedures. Thanks for the Dragnet idea but the red yarn strung between pushpins of blocks on my wall elicited my cat to advanced degrees of mischief;).
In your work with electronic components, you must have encountered potted components, whose internal workings are covered in plastic and their interface to the rest of whatever system they support is through a smaller number of wires.
A similar concept exists in plumbing. They call such subcomponents manifolds, valves, mixers, and fittings.
Procedures do the same for code. They hide complexity and expose (through their interfaces ) the limitations of their effects on their environment. (It is frowned on to have a procedure converse with global variables on the job, like a servant on the phone in the presence of their master. (I watch too much BBC)).
When using value procedure calls together, it is called piping, like the plumbing analogy, not nesting.
