What you really want to do, in order to benefit from your efforts in writing this piece of code, is to make it flexible and modular enough so that you can re-use it sometime down the road.
The issue with typical LED displays, and the benefits of using chips like max72xx, is that they have to be constantly updated in a multiplexing environment. That means you cannot put them into a loop yet be assured of the performance in any given projection.
The purpose of my proposal is to make the LED display look like a controller-based LCD display: all you need to be concerned about is the buffer and the actual display related activities are handled behind the scenes, completely transparent to you.