From: Bulat Ziganshin <bulatz@...>
Date: 2002-12-19T00:42:09+09:00
Subject: Re: hash vs. array (dictionary lookup)

Hello dblack,

Wednesday, December 18, 2002, 6:14:15 PM, you wrote:

>> words.each do |word|
>>       lexicon[word]=0
>> end
>>
>> Disaster! It took me about 15 seconds to load the
>> dictionary. Problem is that the #each method took too
>> much time.

dcsn> That's really puzzling.  I ran the same script in .23s real time,
dcsn> using a dict with about 38K words, on a 1.4GHz Pentium.

hmm :)  but in any case we need more functions to do fast computations
with hashes. i propose:

Array#to_hash as reverse to Hash#to_a
Hash#update(anArray) as equivalent to Hash#update(anArray.to_hash)
Hash#update(anArray,value) as equivalent to
 anArray.each do |word|
       aHash[word]=value
 end
Hash.new(anArray,value) as equivalent to
 aHash = {}
 anArray.each do |word|
       aHash[word]=value
 end

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:bulatz@integ.ru