parallel sort question

[Jim Ault]

On 3/6/06 1:49 PM, "J. Landman Gay" <jacque at hyperactivesw.com> wrote:

> Jim Ault wrote:
>> Sorting by another field.  Parallel sort question
>> Is there an easy syntax for using the sort lines to do parallel sorting
> 
> There is nothing built-in, but I've used this:
> local lKeyData, lLineCounter
> 
> on sortBy keyField -- parallel sorting of linked flds
>    put fld keyField into lKeyData
>    put "data1,data2,data3" into dataFields -- fill in your fld names here
>    repeat with i = 1 to the number of items of dataFields
>      put 0 into lLineCounter
>      sort lines of fld (item i of dataFields) by key()
>    end repeat
> end sortBy
> 
> function key
>    add 1 to lLineCounter
>    return line lLineCounter of lKeyData
> end key
> 
Thanks for the response.
In my current case, fld 2 has short, one-word 'tags', so
-----------
get fld listToSort
repeat with x = 1 to the number of lines in it
   put line x of fld 2 & " " before line x of it
end repeat
sort it descending by word 1 of each
repeat for each line LNN in it
   put word 2 to -1 of LNN & CR after finalOrder
end repeat
delete last char of finalOrder
put it into fld listToSort
---------
Which is fast enough for my very small data blocks.
My next task this evening is waaay more data to sort.

Thanks,

Jim Ault
Las Vegas