On Feb 15, 2007, at 6:32 PM, Marc Zeedar wrote:
Then, to check for the existence, during the display methods I use
If d.KeyExists theList(i) Then ...
My question is - with potentially 10K selection lines, is this an
abuse of the dictionary class? Will it be faster than parsing an
array of the same data?
This is exactly what dictionaries are for!
As a test once, I loaded 200K spelling words in a dictionary and
checked a user's typing in an editfield for spelling errors. Turned
out my code for retrieving the last full word typed (not as simple
as it sounds) took much longer than the superfast dictionary look-
up. I had to get that optimized, but eventually I had it so the
user could type full speed without the live spelling checking
slowing things down. Pretty cool! I just love dictionaries.
As an aside, don't be afraid to make a dictionary subclass, in which
the lookup returns the exact type you're looking for, so you don't
have to keep casting the damn variants all the time.
I've also used a dictionary as a Set type, by wrapping the dictionary
with some set operations. You just add the set's values as keys to
the dictionary, and ignore the value it's mapped to. Intersection and
whatnot are slow (but so what?), but membership testing is fast as
blazes.
I, too, use dictionaries all the time. Probably a third of my classes
use a dictionary for one thing or another.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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