jbv wrote:

There may be other ways to handle this, although if using the built-in
sort command will do what you need it's reasonably efficient.  It's only
one line of code -- was it causing a problem in your script?

it's not causing any problem in my script.

again, I was just wondering about any logic behind the keys order...
actually, there's only 1 situation I can imagine in which it could be
useful to know in advance in which order keys would be output :
in heavy math treatments with loops in which arrays values & keys
are needed for further processing, many lines of code (sort commands)
would be saved and scripts sped up significantly...

If you're up for it feel free to post the code and the folks here can see what can be done to optimize it. I've been very impressed with the results of that sort of group effort here and on the MC list, and I've learned a lot from those exercises.

A recent example:

The script colorization algorithm in the MC IDE was quite slow, taking more than 30 seconds to colorize long scripts like libURL on my 1GHz Mac. Those of us who volunteer to work on the MC IDE were looking for ways to speed that up, but we considered caching the htmlText a last resort since that workaround adds its own difficulties (increases object size, adds stuff to the user's custom properties, and introduces additional complexity into the code base, requiring overhead to maintain and keep it in synch).

More importantly, this type of algorithm is likely useful in other people's apps, so coming up with a way to do this efficiently without caching would open doors for Rev's customers, turning what was a annoyance and a support expense into an inspiring liberation.

I don't know much, but I know there are a lot of people in this community much smarter than I am, so I posted a note to the MC IDE list to ask for help in optimizing this.

We had four people come up with a variety of alternatives, all of which were several orders of magnitude faster and none of which required caching.

The end result is that there's now a script colorization algorithm available which can do libURL in about a second -- and that's on a slow machine.

This exercise not only gave us a very valuable algorithm, but more importantly reinforced the value of leveraging the collective wisdom of the community when facing a difficult challenge.

After that experience I'm sold: as soon as I come across a task that I think is impossible, I invite others to look it over and I always learn a lot in the process. And usually the code gets both smaller and faster as well. :)


BTW here's a suggestion for a slight improvement of the "keys" function :
    get the numKeys of myArray  -->  outputs the keys in numeric order
    get the alphaKeys of myArray  -->  outputs the keys in alphabetic order

Those might be handy indeed -- have you submitted those requests to BZ?

--
 Richard Gaskin
 Managing Editor, revJournal
 _______________________________________________________
 Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com
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