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

Chet Ramey <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.shells.bash.bugs
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 8/26/26 9:43 AM, Zachary Santer wrote:

> Bash could potentially implement a -s "sorted" option for the declare
> builtin, allowing the user to dictate that expansions of *this
> particular* associative array be in lexicographic order of keys. That
> would at least be more granular than a shopt option. Additionally, the
> LC_ALL/LC_COLLATE that's set when that declare command executes could
> dictate the collation order in effect throughout the lifetime of this
> associative array. So, a given red-black tree or whatever could be
> maintained throughout that time, rather than requiring bash to sort
> the associative array each time it's expanded.

That's a pretty high implementation and maintenance cost, not to mention
a potential run-time cost, for a feature that historically no one has
requested.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    [email protected]    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.