[Javascript] dynamic var names

[Terry Riegel]

I have always called this indirection, and have found several uses  
for it. Not sure about js but I have used it on several server side  
projects. Here is a quick outline of one such usage.

I had a user editable table that needed quite bit of processing for  
each row in the table. I needed a way to cache the results. So I  
created (via indirection) a variable whose name was the same as the  
ID from each row.

So I needed a way to flag that a rows processing had been cached. I  
created a variable whose name was the row ID. Since this ID was  
assigned in the user editable table I had to use indirection to read/ 
write to the variable.

It is a little confusing, and Javascript may have better ways of  
doing this.



Terry



On Aug 7, 2007, at 6:22 PM, Scott Reynen wrote:

> On Aug 7, 2007, at 3:18 PM, Troy III Ajnej wrote:
>
>> My understanding is that you are trying to asign a value to the  
>> value!
>
> Not exactly.  A dynamic variable name would assign a value to a  
> variable with the name of a value.  It's a pretty obscure concept,  
> but in PHP, for example, you can do this like so:
>
> $variableName = 'foo';
> ${ $variableName } = 'bar';
> print( $foo ); // outputs 'bar'
>
> I've only ever found that useful in two contexts, neither of which  
> appear to apply here: 1) obfuscation (i.e. making code more  
> confusing than necessary) and 2) meta-programming (i.e. writing  
> another programming language within PHP).
>
> Peace,
> Scott
>
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