> It does, of course, lead to the question of why you want to know! I used to have a program I called that would take a select list & sort it according to the group order of the file it was going to be applied to. For really big lists it made a really big difference because subsequent file i/o flowed sequentially through the file with several consecutive groups read into memory by the os, (yes, except for overflow) then all records from those groups processed.
I would use it whenever I had a big select list that was built independently of the file it was going to process and the processing order did not really matter. It worked on Pick, where their one algorithm is well-know and easily duplicated, and on Prime, which gave us the !HASHID function. (I think that's what it was called, but I may be remembering !HUSHIT, which my dyslexic brain would always turn around, sticking the "!" on the back end and associating the "SH" with the "IT" that followed instead of with the preceding "HU", which dyslexia somehow converted into "OH", anyway.) I wouldn't care about their algorithms, per se, but I wish IBM would give us a similar function: GROUP.NO = HASHID( TYPE, MOD, SEP, ID ) Sort of like the RECORD verb, except that actually goes out and does file i/o: >RECORD VOC ASDASDF Record "ASDASDF" hashes to group 233 but was not found. >RECORD VOC SYS.HELP Record "SYS.HELP" hashes to group 847 and was found. > -- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oliver.com/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
