On Oct 2, 2006, at 4:48 PM, Karen wrote:
But meanwhile, SortWith is pretty handy and, apparently,
underappreciated. :)
It's not hard to use for relatively simple sorts, but if the object
array is large and involes 2 or 3 object fields, having to do a
first pass to create the string array could be relatively costly, no?
Or would that likely not be significant because of the overhead of
calling the Compare method each time in the sort?
Not that I have a ton of experience, but I think it would be about
the same in terms of speed... or possibly even faster for the first
method because the comparison values are cached into a standard (and
optimized) sortable datatype.
The size of the array doesn't matter too much because it is always
going to take longer to sort large arrays than it will small ones.
The bigger issue with the a Compare() approach that it will remain
rather limited until REALbasic provides some method to inspect
properties of generic objects. You could implement a
ComparableInterface but how would you specify which property to sort
by? In addition, you couldn't overload the return value, so you
would really have to have at least three interfaces:
CompareAsStringInterface, CompareAsIntegerInterface, and
CompareAsDoubleInterface. But then you still wouldn't be able to
specify which property to sort by if there were multiple options...
for example a Person class might want to sort by FamilyName and by
FirstName. But once REALbasic has object introspection (is that
right?) then you could have a syntax something like:
Dim theArray() As myClass
theArray.SortBy(myClass.theProperty)
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