Re: Creating a dictionary who's objects are also linked or indexed?

FROM : Aaron Jacobs
DATE : Sat Aug 12 22:42:51 2006

Honestly, I don't understand your first paragraph.  But if it's 
saying the same thing as the second one, I guess you could make a 
category on NSArray with a method like itemsBetweenFirst:andSecond: 
that just returns an array with the items you are looking for using 
simple comparison on the receiver's own objects.

On Aug 12, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Phil wrote:

> I'm curious if there is a better Cocoa solution than I've found to 
> the following problem:  I often have a list of items (strings, 
> numbers, or dates) where I know the values of the first and last 
> items and need to iterate over the inclusive set of items that fall 
> between the first and last items.  I can accomplish this by 
> effectively implementing the lookup capability of a dictionary in 
> an object contained in an array or by adding an index to an object 
> in a dictionary.  It can also be handled using Core Data which 
> seems a lot like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
>
> For example, I have a list of names and want to enumerate over the 
> set of items from a given item to a given item.  My code determines 
> that "Ball" is the first value of interest and "Smith" is the last 
> value, and given these, I need to return the inclusive set of items 
> that fall between (simple alpha comparison) these values in the 
> parent set.
>
> It seems like a fairly common problem and am wondering if Cocoa 
> provides a simpler solution that I'm not seeing?