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I see memeblocks used within programs.
Could someone describe the reasoning behind there use and point to a description / tutorial on the benifits derived from them?

Thanks in advance

memblocks are nothing more than data stored in machine format.

Rather than having an integer, float or string such as

a=0
a#=0.0
a$="zero"

You have a byte, word, long word (dword?).

A byte is 8 bits of information, and a bit is either a 1 or a 0.

Words are two bytes, and a long word or double word is 4 bytes.

Because this is data in it's rawest format it can be used to hold and manipulate data very efficiently, such as an object mesh, or a texture file - you can access the individual bytes and play around with them.

Even text can be held in a memblock, you may be aware but there is an ASCII code for every character, much like the scancode but the table is different (http://www.asciitable.com). Now if memory serves correct (and i'm too lazy to look) then the letter A has a value of 32.

We could put the value of 32 into a byte of a memblock.

Now lets say we write a program the 'scramble' our text. To scramble it we could add a value of 100 to that ASCII value, so we take the 32, and make it 132.

Of course we can do that with other commands too, but memblocks allow us to do this with image data, objects, limbs, sound - anything you want.

They're also quite handy for constructing and decoding multiplayer game packets.

Note that my memory did indeed not serve me well, /shrug. 32 is space.

you can load something like a bitmap into them and perform operations at speed over large amounts of data (like you could invert the colours in said bitmap), they also allow you to play directly with data and get your hands dirty, you could make a memblock and fill it with the correct values for an wav file then stuff it full of random numbers and get white noise (or modify an existing sound, make the pitch higher or merge two soundtracks for example) when you convert it back to audio, or modify the information that makes up a model directly, mostly for advanced users, but even I have been known to use em, cheers.

Mentor.

Memblocks is a very useful piece of DB. Right now, for instance, I'm learning how to bypass several of the known "issues" with DBP, such as friction free motion.

If you move an object with move object then you'll always move in the current heading. But if you ignore that command and do a bit of coding, you could twist and spin your object and keep it moving it in the same direction as before -- regardless of its orientation.

There's probably a simpler way to do that, but it'll teach me about memblocks. The good thing with DBP is that you can take something like memblocks, and use them in ways the language makers didn't consider when they wrote in the limitations to the language

I'll also use the memblocks as chained objects, much like an array but a lot faster, for my game entities.