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Asked: 2026-06-09T21:10:21+00:00

Background : I am having a discussion with a friend regarding the correct way

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Background:

I am having a discussion with a friend regarding the correct way to refer to elements within a 2D array for something I’m designing. I was unhappy with using XNA’s Point and Vector2 structs as array references because the properties of them are labelled X and Y.

I created my structs for these, ArrayPoint and ArrayVector2 and called my own properties I and J. My friend thinks this is a massive waste of time, however, I do not like swapping the X and Y references because my maths background has always taught me to use i and j for matrices, e.g using myArray[i, j] instead of myArray[y, x].

What is the best way to deal with this situation?

Is it simply a case of swapping x and y? Or creating your own structs to deal with it how you like? Is it all down to personal preference since this is pretty much all arbitrary anyway?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Listen to your friend!

    There are so many reasons this is a bad idea, here are a few:

    • Your maths background may say i and j. But for arrays that map into 2D space (eg: a tile map, as opposed to a matrix) then x and y are actually preferable as they convey semantic meaning that makes your code easier to understand. (ie: you have X and Y axes, not I and J).

    • (Usually the cases where i and j make more semantic sense, you won’t be storing the indexers in a struct anyway – they’ll just be temporary locals.)

    • Without a genuine reason, less code is always preferable to more code. Writing and testing code takes up valuable time. Using someone else’s code (like the built-in XNA types) saves you time.

    • One day you might write some utility function that takes a Point. If you have two versions of Point then you could well end up with two versions of that function. More code and, worse still: duplicate code!

    • “Not Invented Here” is a really, really, really bad habit to get into as a programmer. Learn to live with other people’s code (as long as it works – which, in this case, it does).

    • No one else does this. Your code is going to confuse and annoy everyone who tries to work with it.

    • Small performance hit needlessly copying things around. (Plus a few other esoteric things that will have a minor affect on performance.)

    (Also: indexing into an array with a Vector2 (floating point) is kinda weird.)

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