a bunch of questions: sample/cycle count, accessing different context attributes

[Michiel Spape]

Hi,
Just to say, sorry about the lack of coding bits and bops in the E-Primer, we'd been working to extend that, but with a target audience of students without *any* coding experience, and a limited amount of time, there's so much you can do. Secondly, I find that, unlike you, the "coding ability" in E-Prime is not limited at all, unless you want to do awfully cool stuff, like accessing databases, 3d graphics, whathaveyou, which is generally outside the scope of psychologists. If you want, and I had such a phase as well, it's really rather easy to do your whole experiment in inline, using canvas, loops, etc. At that point, it becomes quite clear why one would use attributes at all: it provides a lot of clarity, not only for yourself, but also for others. Tons of code with somewhere saying somewhere something along the lines of Fixationduration = currentTrial[reorder[trialnum]].FixDur is mindboggling.
2p.
Best,
M
(and I think you're welcome to 'disrespect' the mighty e(vil)-prime all you want!)

Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology
www.cognitology.eu

-----Original Message-----
From: e-prime at googlegroups.com [mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of fledgeling e-Prime mastah
Sent: 13 October 2011 00:43
To: E-Prime
Subject: Re: a bunch of questions: sample/cycle count, accessing different context attributes

Great answer. I must say, I am learning EP1 from the documentation and
some tutorials, like the E-Primer and such, which unfortunately don't
talk much about the coding part of it. Also, since coding ability is a
bit limited (like that 'you can't find the sum of weights' part), it
seems to me that one is doomed if he wants to do something that E-
Prime architects did not think of, even though most people would be
happy with it. It's a generic problem, so do not think of me dissing E-
Prime, it does have great features.

I found on PST website that you can access .sample and .cycle
attributes, but they never mentioned the totals of those; in fact,
they hardcoded theirs in the examples provided on the website, which
is very peculiar. Is there any reason why one would not allow you to
check the bounds of an array?

Regarding attributes, I simply don't understand why you would have
attributes.. Chapter 4 doesn't touch that very much, apart from saying
that attributes are logged by default, which is what I want. From the
code that I studied while writing my own thing, they seemed like
global variables and were used like normal variables, actually.
Similarly, accessing the elements of a List is done through
attributes, so that compounds the issue for me, suggesting that
somehow e-Prime's work horse is attributes, not variables.

Anyways, your solution is very good and I will put it to use as soon
as I can. Thanks a bunch!

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