Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Figure 3-4. Continuous radial gradient
If you don’t remember, the original stepped gradient example was about four times as
long and not nearly as pretty.
Finally, in the latest version of Java (1.5), as of this writing, there is a new variation on the
for loop, called a for-each loop, or enhanced for loop. I am not going to cover it, as it is
not currently supported in Processing. Information about it can be found on Sun’s site at
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/foreach.html.
Processing efficiency
You already saw that arrays hold multiple values and loops allow you to repeatedly execute
code. You can use these two structures together to form a powerful and highly efficient
data processing system. As an example, here’s a simple mail merge program that
outputs mailing addresses in the text area of the Processing application. The data is stored
in six separate arrays, for first names, last names, street, city, state, and country.
// mail merge program
//create some arrays with address data
String[]firstName = {"Ira ", "Sophie ", "Ian ", "Robin "};
String[]lastName = {"Jed", "Rose", "Isaac", "McLennan"};
String[]street = {"4 Happy Ln, ", "19 Hunan Pl, ", ➥
"104 Hevi Hevi St, ", "1000 Donkey Dr, "};
String[]city = {"Oxford", "Changsha", "Easton", "Edinboro"};
String[]state = {"Ohio, ", "Hunan, ", "Pennsylvania, ", "Scotland, "};
String[]country = {"USA", "China", "USA", "UK"};
// use a for loop to generate merge
for (int i=0; i