Dumb sort question - Tanks & Comments

[jbv]

Thank you all for your help & suggestions.
Unfortunately, none of them helped solving
my problem...
Below you'll find a few more info on what
I'm trying to do, comments on some suggestions
and finally some feature requests for future versions
of MC.

Basically, I need to sort a variable featuring 5 lines
with a max of 30,000 items each. The sort key could
be any of the 5 lines, and after sorting I'd like to extract
any line of the variable (get line 3 of myVariable) for
further processing. The content of every item of every
line can change / evolve continuously.
When the variable is organized as 30,000 lines of 5 items
each, sorting is a snap (less than 1 second), but then
extracting 1 column is impossible...


............................
Jacqueline :
Thanks for your script : it works great, but when the variable
reaches 20,000 items per line, it becomes way too slow...

............................
Ray :
Yes, the transpose function looks attracting, but unfortunately
it only works on arrays. And once the array has been transposed,
it seems impossible to extract 1 single line / row. I tried to put the
array
content into a variable, but it remains stractured as an array...
BTW, when the size of a 2 dimensions array reaches a certain limit
(5 rows & 20,000 column), I get the error message : "can't transpose
this array" (or something similar), while it works fine with 5 rows and
10,000 colums... Is it a bug ?

............................
Mr X :
Yes, 1 of the Rinaldi externals does that perfectly, but doesn't run
on Windoze...

............................
Andu and Tariel :
Yes, being able to access arrays content via individual rows & columns
would be a GREAT feature...
I'd even dare to say that future versions of MC should implement most
of the properties & functions associated with spreadsheets in OMO, but
applied to arrays, which means :
- the ability to split arrays vertically & horizontally
- the ability to extract individual rows / colums
- the ability to sort the content of an array according to sort keys
that
could be individual rows / colums
- a special find function that would work like in OMO spreadsheets :
    find rows of myTab where item 2 > 10
    would return a comma-separated list of numbers of rows for which
this condition is true

Actually, spreadsheets in OMO where 1 of the greatest tools I've ever
used and I still miss them several years later...
Of course, this would work on 1 or 2 dimension arrays; for 3 dimension
arrays, things get more complex...

Cheers,
JB