[ruby-talk:8549] Re: speedup of anagram finder

In article <[e-mail]>,
David Alan Black  <[e-mail]> wrote:
>Hello --
>
>My benchmark results for this, on the first 10K words of /usr/dict/words
>(lowercased), are:
>			 user     system      total        real
>   histogram         5.650000   0.010000   5.660000 (  5.658936)
>   unpack            2.270000   0.000000   2.270000 (  2.276009)
>   histogram         5.530000   0.000000   5.530000 (  5.523607)
>   unpack            2.120000   0.000000   2.120000 (  2.123110)

Yes, I made a mistake in  benchmarking, now my results agree with yours.
I guess actually  the interpretive overhead is indeed too  high, and any
solution which uses a primitive (like sort) will be faster than any loop
even if the algorithm embodied by the loop is superior...

  I think trying  to optimize too much in an  interpreted language leads
to  perverse algorithms  after a  while (that  is, algorithms  which are
theoretically  inferior but  do better  because  they happen  to call  a
convenient primitive).  To get  a fast  algorithm here,  the best  is to
implement yourself sort for strings in the kernel, written in C. Then no
pack, no  unpack just this  call to sort... But  this is like  a special
anagram-primitive  in  the kernel,  a  bit  silly.  Of course  the  best
approach would  be to speed up  execution of .each loops  until perverse
algorithms are no more tempting.