Hi everyone. I've searched the forums and haven't been able to find anything related to what I'm trying to do. I've been able to do it manually but I'm hoping for a more elegant solution.

I have a String array that's 10 elements long that I want to store incoming serial data in. But I want the newest data to be element [0], and the second newest to be [1] and so on - until the oldest incoming data gets "pushed off" the end of the array and deleted. So everything gets pushed down one element whenever new data comes in. I believe this is called FIFO (First In First Out).

I can easily accomplish this like so: (shortened to 3 elements)
lastThreeStrings[2] = lastThreeStrings[1];
lastThreeStrings[1] = lastThreeStrings[0];
lastThreeStrings[0] = incomingSerialString;

A while back I tried putting this into a loop and it didn't work, so I reverted to the above method but with 10 strings.

So the question is this: is there a more elegant way to do what I'm trying to do?

I thought of something like this:
lastThreeStrings = reverse(lastThreeStrings);
lastThreeStrings = shorten(lastThreeStrings);
lastThreeStrings = reverse(lastThreeStrings);
lastThreeStrings = expand(lastThreeStrings, 1);

But that seems a bit convoluted too, although it might seem less convoluted if I had an array with thousands of elements.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I'm wondering if anyone has upgraded to Lion on the Mac yet and seen if Processing works on it. I see that there is apparently a program launch problem with the Arduino IDE (which is based on the Processing IDE, right?), but moving the app to the desktop solves it. Any such issues with the Processing IDE? I know there were some Java support issues in Lion but haven't kept track of the status of it.

Any help would be great.