Speed up a slow loop

[J. Landman Gay]

On 3/2/22 7:44 PM, Jerry Jensen via use-livecode wrote:
> Instead of putting the keys into tCorrWdList and using
> “among the lines of tCorrWdList",
> how about using “among the keys of tCorrWdList”?
> 
> Judging from no knowledge of the internals but guessing what it must do:
> “among the lines” has to look for all the line endings (unicode!),
> but “among the keys” can jump along by constant offsets since
> the keys are all fixed length hashes ?
> The lines happen to be all the same length, but “among the lines” can’t assume that and has to go look.
> 
> Maybe I’m missing something again . . .
> .Jerry

Actually, this is what I do:

   if sDictFile[L] = true then...

which I thought would be pretty fast since it's accessing the array directly. The array looks 
like this:

sDictFile
   word1 -> true
   word2 -> true
   word3 -> true

And my loop does this, for each user word:

   if sDictFile["word2"] = true then...

so I'm not really looping through the keys, just looking for a matching one. The loop is for 
each user word I need to find. If there's no key, then the word isn't legal. I hope that makes 
sense.

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