Re: WHINY_USERS=0

[Tim Menzies]

so the default (undocumented) behavior is that for(i in a) processes i
in sorted order?

i'm puzzled by that. i remember Kerningham saying they had that in awk
1.0 then pulled it our cause it made everything too slow. aharon- did
you come up with some neat incremental sorting trick?

t

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Hermann Peifer <address@hidden> wrote:
> Aharon Robbins wrote:
>>
>> It's what programmer types call an "easter egg", meaning an undocumented
>> feature with unusual or interesting behavior, and I intend to keep it
>> that way (but see the gawk.texi file :-).
>>
>> The feature as coded means "if WHINY_USERS exists in the environment,
>> enable the whiny user related features." (There are at least two.)
>>
>> So, the behavior you're seeing is what I wanted.  I don't intend to
>> change it.
>>
>> Personally, I think you should use asort or asorti if you want array
>> sorting. The code is much clearer that way.
>
> Aharon,
>
> Thanks for the explanations, which confirms my observation that
> WHINY_USERS=0 isn't enough to unset the variable.
>
> About asort() and asorti(): I use these functions occasionally, but what I
> actually need most are simply sorted *original* array indices (which almost
> always have some meaning, like country code, or similar, so I don't want to
> destroy them). IMO, there is nothing better and cleaner than WHINY_USERS to
> achieve this gawk behaviour. The built-in asorti() function forces me to
> copy src array into dest array in order to avoid the loss of original
> indices. This makes the code more complicated, as I see it.
>
> Anyway: I actually didn't want to start a discussion here. Thanks again for
> the WHINY_USERS easter egg!.
>
> Hermann
>
> PS for Tim: You might want to re-visit your WHINY_USERS performance test
> described in http://awk.info/?tip/whinyUsers
>



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