Dumb sort question

[andu]

--On Wednesday, December 04, 2002 18:26:32 +0000 jbv 
<jbv.silences at club-internet.fr> wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> Sorting a variable made of various lines with several items
> in each line with the sort command is easy :
>
>     sort lines of Myvariable by item 2 of each
>
>
> But how can I sort a variable featuring 4 lines with several
> hundreds of items in each, so that (for instance) items of
> line 4 are sorted numeric ascending, and (that's important)
> items of other lines being moved according to the new
> position of each item of line 4 ?
>
> For instance :
>     line 1 :    b,d,c,a
>     line 2 :    2,4,3,1
>
> after sorting line 2, the content would become :
>     line 1 :    a,b,c,d
>     line 2 :    1,2,3,4
>
> I have the feeling this can't be done in MC, while I remember
> doing it in OMO using the spreadsheet control...
>
> Thanks for any suggestion.
> JB
>
> P.S. I need to do it FAST on large variables, therefore a repeat
> loop won't do.

I don't think you can do it without at least one repeat since we don't have 
the concept of columns in MC.

This sounds good as a feature request - columns, columnDelimiter.

Regards, Andu Novac