Speed

[David Vaughan]

On Wednesday, Sep 18, 2002, at 20:08 Australia/Sydney, Jim Hurley wrote:

> This is a postscript to my previous message regarding speed.
>
> I'm embarrassed to say there is a simple way to employ "repeat for 
> each line..." and the difference in speed is profound.
>
> But I would nevertheless like to understand why "repeat with i = 1 to 
> the number of lines in...." is so much slower

Jim

It is the counting, which is done each time. Imagine you have a list of 
a paltry three lines. The linefeed character marks the end of line, and 
you have no other information. So, to get line 1, you count up 
character by character from 1 to the first linefeed. For line 2, start 
at char 1 again and count until the second linefeed, taking data from 
the first one. For line 3, count from the beginning again... you can 
see this gets pretty tedious, even for a computer, when you are 
referencing lines 5997, 5998 and so on.

Worse, if within the loop you refer to that line by index again, then 
it is counted again. After all, you may have changed the data in the 
meantime.

>  and whether putting the list of lines in an array is the better way 
> to go in those situations where "repeat for each...." is not > practical.

Using an array is faster than doing the line index thing. Look up 
combine and split to convert between arrays and existing lists, or 
create new arrays on the fly.

Have fun.

cheers
David

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