Making Revolution faster using dimensioned arrays

Marielle Lange M.Lange at ed.ac.uk
Thu Jul 7 19:19:52 EDT 2005


Hi Dennis,

Sorry, I am not in favour of this if this means that I would loose the
possibility to index arrays with text or to have to specify the array size in
advance.

Personally, I need to index with text parts that I don't know in advance what
the size of the array will be. With this type of constraint, the solution you
suggest in fact considerably slows down the programs I write. My experience
with a program doing exactly the same thing: Visual Basic 5 hours (which does
*exactly* what you request, Awk 10 min which does *exactly* what you complain
about.

Gawk does it very fast without the need for any of these two options.
Look at this link, for evidence:  http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~loui/sigplan
"Two pearls in GAWK:  its regular expressions and its associative arrays."

By chance, could SQLlite help to speed up your array processing? (after all, a
database with two columns of data is just another representation for an array
and you can apply a formula to transform the values of one column)

Marielle


To all the speed freaks,

I know that I have pushed for faster array processing and have even
proposed an "Array sub-processor" as a possible solution.  However,
after giving this much thought, I don't believe that a separate array
sub-processor is needed to solve the problem of speed.  Transcript
could provide the speed needed for processing arrays in a simpler way.

If Transcript had an array declaration command that allowed the user
to fix the dimensions and data size/type for an array and limited the
"keys" to integer indexes, then high speed array processing could be
built-in.



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