Reverse a list

[J. Landman Gay]

Just tinkering around on a lazy Sunday, and I thought I'd come up with a 
neat way to reverse a list without using the traditional clunky method:

function reverseSort pList
   repeat for each line l in pList
     put l & cr before tList
   end repeat
   return tList
end reverseSort

One of the best things I learned from a past LC converence came from 
Jerry Daniels who said "let the engine do it." It's almost always faster 
and more efficient. With that in mind I wrote this:

local sNum

function reverseText pList
   put the number of lines in pList into sNum
   sort lines of pList numeric by reverseSort(each)
   return pList
end reverseText

function reverseSort pTxt
   subtract 1 from sNum
   return sNum && pTxt
end reverseSort

Works great and I was proud. Then I did some timing tests and found out 
the two methods are very close to equivalent in timing, and on long 
lists, the first way is actually faster.

So much for improving on LC's text chunking speed. Pah.

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