Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

PROCESSING: CREATIVE CODING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART
90
print(street[i]);
println(city[i]);
print(state[i]);
println(country[i]);
println();
}
The sketch outputs the following:
Ira Jed
4 Happy Ln, Oxford
Ohio, USA
Sophie Rose
19 Hunan Pl, Changsha
Hunan, China
Ian Isaac
104 Hevi Hevi St, Easton
Pennsylvania, USA
Robin McLennan
1000 Donkey Dr, Edinboro
Scotland, UK
The for loop does all the heavy lifting by moving through the arrays, using the counter as
the index to the position in the arrays. Also notice in this example that I alternated
between print() and println() to format the address and line spacing correctly. Using a
for loop to process four elements in each array may not seem too impressive. But imagine
if each of the arrays included 10,000 elements. This simple sketch would have just as
easily processed and output all that address data as well (of course, it would have taken a
few more seconds). To better illustrate this, let’s look at a more visually interesting example.
I’m going to take the previous bouncing ball animation and beef it up some, using
arrays and a loop or two. I’ll also be incorporating one of Processing’s handiest functions:
random(value), which generates a random value between 0 and the value argument.
This example is a little long—try not to panic. You’ll be looking at a lot of code like this
throughout the book. I recommend running the sketch before reading through the code.
You may even want to mess around with some of the values to see how it changes the
output.
Here’s the Many Bouncing Balls program (see Figure 3-5):
/*
title: Many Bouncing Balls
description: balls deflect off sketch window edges
created: August 9, 2005
by: Ira Greenberg
*/
// global variables