At 10:54 AM -0800 7/14/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >I have been tasked with converting all of the network utilities I've written >over the years in MUMPS into a language likely to be known by more people. >Most of it will be converted to Perl. So far the conversion hasn't presented >to many difficulties but there is one construct for which I have not been able >to derive a close equivalent. To wit: > >MUMPS arrays use alphanumeric indicies with a defined collating order. Numeric >subscripts collate first, in numeric order, followed by string subscripts in >ASCII order. Thus, an array with the following indicies would collate in this >order: -2,-1,0,1,2,9,100,101.5,A,E,H,a,c,z etc. MUMPS arrays are also sparse >arrays and are multidimensional. However, for this question, it is okay to >assume an array with only one dimension. > >The MUMPS language provides a function, called $ORDER, which takes an argument >and returns the next index that exists in the array that would come after the >supplied argument (a 2nd argument can be used to cause the function to return >the previous index instead of the next index). For example, given an array >with the index values given above, if I asked for the next index after 0, I >would get 1; the next index after 50 would return 100; the next index after "Z" >would return "a"; etc. > >My question: is there any way to approach similar functionality in Perl? Any >non-numeric arrays in my code are being converted to Perl hashes. I can >retrieve the value of a specific key, and I can use a for loop to go through >every key/value pair but, is there any way of doing something similar to $ORDER >without have to scan the entire hash? Also, is there any defined order in >which a hash is stored?
No, I don't think you can depend on the order of hash storage, though there are various ordered hash modules available. You might try a a tied hash implemented via a lookaside hash that keeps track of the next and previous keys for each key in the primary hash. Have you looked at the MUMPS to Perl translator at: http://search.cpan.org/~smueller/Language-Mumps-1.07/Mumps.pm Even if the code it generates is not something you want to use, you might get ideas for how to do things. Whatever you do, I would recommend borrowing from what's out there, and there is a lot of it. Go to <http://search.cpan.org> and try some likely searches such as "sparse" or "ordered hash." -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
