Scratch

What is the fastest, most optimised way to determine where a letter falls into the alphabet (e.g. a = 1, z = 26)?

I know of a few ways to do it but I'm wondering if anyone has thought much about this and has a very fast solution?

the fastest method I can think of is to have a list with each item containing a letter, then running this script:

set [count v] to [0]
set [searchChar v] to [x]
repeat until <(item (count) of [letters v]) = (searchChar)>
change [count v] by (1)
end

I wanted to add a < > or <(count) > [26])> to that, but scratchblocks was having none of it.

EDIT: I suppose one way to optimise this would be to store characters, not alphabetically, but in order of most used...

EDIT2: I actually just added time blocks to this:

set [count v] to [0]
reset timer
set [searchChar v] to [z]
repeat until <(item (count) of [letters v]) = (searchChar)>
change [count v] by (1)
end
set [time v] to (timer)

and in turbo-mode, this got me a time of 0.0 seconds for z...

The technique above seems to be able to check a list of 188 characters in 0.1 seconds in Scratch Turbo-mode, so that's fast enough for me. Asking for this topic to be closed.

Last edited by sparks (2012-03-02 13:28:00)