FlexibleLearning wrote: > Proof of how optimized syntax can make an enormous difference to speed (by > orders of magnitude in this case). > > This is BAD... > repeat for each line L in tData > add 1 to n > put (item 1 of L/div1) into item 1 of line n of stdout > put (item 2 of L/div2) into item 2 of line n of stdout > end repeat > > This is GOOD... > repeat for each line L in tData > put (item 1 of L/div1) &","& (item 2 of L/div2) &CR after stdout > end repeat > > The Rule is: Less is More.
Sometimes. Hard to generalize along those lines when you come to things like RegEx, which is very compact to write but so enormously generalized that it's often slower than brute-force parsing using simple chunks. One non-obvious detail worth noting in your second example is that some years ago Raney optimized the "after" form of "put" so some of the overhead you might normally expect under the hood with those sorts of wholesale block moves is somewhat alleviated, delivering a bit perkier performance. But the big tell-tale sign with the example above is the presence of the line number specifier inside the loop. I know you know this, but for the benefit of the many newcomers who've joined this list in recent months: Expressions relying on delimiters (token, word, item, line) are simple to write and often very efficient, but when using them on large amounts of data may be somewhat slow. esp. if used repeatedly within a loop. In the example above, "line n of stdout" requires that the engine walk through each character in stdout, counting the return chars as it goes, stopping only after it reaches n returns. Doing this once may not be so bad, but within a repeat loop it has to keep going over and over the same set of characters each time through the loop. Fortunately, as the second example takes advantage of, the "repeat for each" method only walks through the data once, keeping track of where it is in each iteration and conveniently parsing out the last chunk ready for use within the loop. This avoids the redundant traversal caused by specifying the line number within the loop, and often results in a performance boost of at least an order of magnitude, often a few orders. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
