Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

part of the article as well. My suggestion when creating strings is to use the shortcut
approach. If for some reason you do need to compare the values of two strings created
using the object-oriented approach (using the new keyword), you can use Java’s String
method equals(). Here’s an example:
Conversion
String s1 = new String("hello");
String s2 = "hello";
println("s1 == s2 is " + (s1 == s2));
println("s1.equals(s2) is " + s1.equals(s2));
String s3 = new String("goodbye");
String s4 = new String("goodbye");
println("s3 == s4 is " + (s3 == s4));
println("s3.equals(s4) is " + s3.equals(s4));
The Conversion section includes ten entries, each of which is a utility function for converting
between one data type and another. Since variables hold values of a specific type,
there are times when, for example, you may need to use a value of type float to pass into
a function that requires an integer value. Processing has a way of doing this conversion,
called type casting. For example, to convert a float variable named gpa to an integer, you
just need to write int(gpa). One issue to consider when doing conversion is truncation. In
my example, the gpa float value will be truncated, or shortened, when it is converted. For
example, if gpa equals 3.97, after converting it using int(gpa), the value returned will be
3 (not 4). Instead of rounding the value, it simply snips off all the values to the right of the
decimal point. Thus, a simple data conversion mistake like this could keep you out of grad
school. There are of course other and better ways to solve this last example (involving logical
value rounding), which I’ll cover later in my discussion of the Math section.
There’s one final cautionary note about using Processing’s int() and float() conversion
functions. Currently, there is a reported and unresolved bug about their use
(http://dev.processing.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=4). Thus, if these functions don’t
seem to be working, it’s recommended that you use Java’s alternative syntax. Here’s an
example:
float temp = 98.64783;
//Processing conversion syntax
int pTemp = int(temp);
println(pTemp);
//Java conversion syntax
int jTemp = (int)temp;
println(jTemp);
PROCESSING LANGUAGE API
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