[Flightgear-devel] Nasal stuff

[Melchior F. <mf...@ao...>]

Since today there's a function  systime()  available. It returns 
the Unix Epoch time in seconds. Even if that doesn't tell you much,
it's very useful for benchmarking:

  var start = systime();
  how_fast_am_I(123);
  var end = systime();

  print("took ", end - start, " seconds");

The function has microseconds precision, so it's even useful for
single function calls. But you can always let the code be run in
a loop for better results. In debug.nas there's a simple wrapper
that would do the same in one line:

  debug.benchmark("test", how_fast_am_I, 123);

or 

  debug.benchmark("test", func {
      how_fast_am_I(123);
  });




The second change today is a new props.Node method getValues().
It returns a subtree's values in a hash, just like the setValues()
method expects its input. This can be used to suck in a group of
parameters. Of course, it only makes sense if all or almost all
parameters are needed, and not to retrieve single values as in
the example:

  var view = props.Node.getNode("/sim/current-view");
  var val = view.getValues();
  print(val["config"]["default-field-of-view-deg"]);

And yes, you can load the whole property tree into a variable:  :-)

  var v = props.globals.getValues();
  debug.dump(v);

m.