David Bovill wrote:
2008/9/14 Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
For accessing specific elements from large collections, arrays outperform
any lineoffset in lists or any other method I can think of by several orders
of magnitude.*
Read, "It's a good hash mechanism". :)
When I need ordinal sequential access, I use ordinal keys. Am I some sort
of freak?
Most of the time I need both with the same data - classic example would be
paragraphs of text with indented titles (an outline index) - or a tree of
objects and their properties. I want the data in a way in which I can
interact with the keys (titles in a hierarchical structure) - and display or
process the data (say a paragraph of text) asociated with that key.
Order sometimes does not matter = click display paragraph - but often does
= reconstruct document. In short I want a simple data model which does both.
With sequentially ordered array keys we would have that.
I do a similar thing with processing sections of HTML in WebMerge, where
I need to grab a page section with in a tag, do a lot of stuff with it,
and tuck it back into that space to generate the final output. For
those I use simple ordinal keys, and it's worked a treat for years.
Your case differs in that each element has two distinct things to keep
track of: title and body.
In the olden days (pre v3) you might consider just using two arrays to
retrieve the title and body for a given ordinal element:
put tMyTitleA[5]
put tMyBodyA[5]
In v3 it seems simple enough to use a single array by just having it use
ordinal keys at its outermost level, and the elements within it are each
their own two-element array, with their keys being "title" and "body",
allowing you to instantly retrieve either for a given item easily:
put tMyData[5]["title"]
put tMyData[5]["body"]
- or -
put tMyData[5] into tMySnippetA
put tMySnippetA["title"]
put tMySnippetA["body"]
Are there cases where putting your arrays inside of ordinal wrapper
arrays would be problematic?
--
Richard Gaskin
Managing Editor, revJournal
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