From: Mike Campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2002-04-24T23:05:06+09:00
Subject: RE: My First Time


> 	There is also mathematically nice recipe for picking random line from
> 	the file. In Perl at
>
> http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/chapter/ch08.html#chap08_picking_0
> 	and in Python at
> 	http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/59865
>
> 	It is ecological, by not reading entire file into the array of
> 	strings. It is easy to write the same in Ruby.


It is a nifty algorithm and works reasonably well, depending on how fast your
rand() is.  I mention this only as a pedantic nit because it calculates a random
number *on every line* of the file, which may or may not be fast enough for you.