On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 8:57 PM Thomas A. Schmitz <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de> wrote:

One final thought: one limitation that I still find cumbersome to work
around is the fact that associative arrays ("pairs" in Lua speak) do not
have an order. When I analyze my texts, I want book numbers, chapters,
paragraphs preserved in the order in which they are read (entered into
the table). In many cases, it is not possible (or extremely awkward) to
sort these numbers, since chapters may be numbered something like 2, 2a,
3, 3α, 3β etc. python has the OrderedDict() in its collections module.
In Lua, the best I could find was entering the chapter numbers into an
array (ipair) and then retrieve it from there. Maybe there is a better way?

table.sort (list [, comp])

Sorts list elements in a given order, in-place, from list[1] to list[#list]. If comp is given, then it must be a function that receives two list elements and returns true when the first element must come before the second in the final order (so that, after the sort, i < j implies not comp(list[j],list[i])). If comp is not given, then the standard Lua operator < is used instead

luigi