Speed up a slow loop

[J. Landman Gay]

In my Boggle game I have an array containing dictionary words as keys, split as set, so all 
values are "true". I need to compare those keys with a list of user words and get back a list 
of good words and a list of illegal words.

The loop takes forever. Here it is (sDictFile is a script local):

   repeat for each line l in pList -- pList is the user word list
     if sDictFile[l] = true then put l & cr after tCheckedList
     else put l & cr after tNonWords
     wait 0 with messages  -- prevent ANRs
   end repeat

I added the wait because my Android phone was putting up an "app not responding" warning while 
the loop was running (or just after, hard to tell.) The loop should be much faster than that. 
When I added some timing checks though, the timer says the loop takes between 0 and 1 
millisecond, and yet the wait on screen remains.

With a 3-word user list, the loop takes 4 seconds. With an 8 word user list the loop takes 6 
seconds. The more user words, the longer the wait.

Even stranger: on my cheapo Android tablet with 4 megs of RAM running Android 9 the response is 
nearly instantaneous, even if the user list has 200+ words. On my Pixel phone with 8 megs of 
RAM and Android 12 the response is slow enough to trigger the ANR with only 3 words. I'm 
building for ARM 64.

I've tried any number of workarounds without luck, on both LC 9.6.6 and LC 10.0.0. Any ideas? I 
have a feeling it isn't the script per se, it's something else.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com