How does the "Join Curves" decide which lines to join first?

I’m not sure of this, but when I use the Join Curves component on a large amount of exploded line segments, it seems like Rhino somehow prioritizes joining colinear line segments first, because my results seem to end up with various sets of colinear segments becoming part of the same joined curve, even when the over all result is multiple joined curves.

To be clear, this priority of colinear segments being joined first is something I see when the input to the Join Curves component is a large flattened list, there’s no data tree issue involved.

Is that how it works? Is there more to it? Is this only a thing that happens with lines or are they ways in which it affects curves, too?

Mostly asking because there are artistic situations where it’d be useful to be able to predict the outcome of joining a large number of shattered line segments or curves.

Does anything else affect the order in which lines and curves are joined? The order in which they were created? Direction? Location (top to bottom?)

Maybe you can share an example and show the result you are after.

it’s less that I was after a result, more that I got an unexpectedly awesome result and was trying to figure out why in order to see if I could use the effect in other ways. It seems like joining colinear lines first might explain it.

Check it out:
Join Colinear First.gh (75.6 KB)


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