The "asort" extension (Was: feature proposal: expand associative arrays in lexicographic order ...)

From:	Greg Wooledge
Subject: Re: The "asort" extension (Was: feature proposal: expand associative arrays in lexicographic order ...)
Date:	Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:03:29 -0400

>On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 16:20:03 -0400, Zachary Santer wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 2:31'PM Stan Marsh <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > Rather, the sorting is a functionality associated with the "for"
>> > statement. That's how it works in GAWK, and I think that should be the
>> > model for how it should work in bash.

>gawk's for-in loop does not sort the array indices.

>hobbit:~$ gawk 'BEGIN {a["foo"]=1; a["bar"]=2; for (i in a) {print i} }'
>foo
>bar

>If they were sorted, bar would have come first.

$ gawk 'BEGIN {
> split("the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog",A)
> for (i in A) B[A[i]]
> PROCINFO["sorted_in"] = "@ind_str_asc"
> for (i in B) print i
> }'
brown
dog
fox
jumps
lazy
over
quick
the
 $ 

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