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 12:32 PM, Stan Marsh wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> *Somebody* must have requested it, or else the "asort" extension (the
> subject of this thread) would never have been dreamed up and/or
> implemented.

I didn't write it. It was contributed back in 2020, and it wasn't due to
any request. The original author had written it for his own use several
years before, mostly to learn how loadable builtins worked, and asked if
I wanted it.

> 
> Surely, the need for traversing a bash associative array in alphabetical
> order (or something like that) is not *that* new or novel.  I myself
> discussed this with you (over email) a few years back - which is what
> led to my creating the idiom that I posted earlier (because the asort
> extension didn't make any sense to me).

You mean 2022, right? You asked about asort, said you didn't understand it,
and said you'd use a different solution. This doesn't rise to the level of
requesting some new feature.

-- 
``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/
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