Re: [MacPerl] sorting arrays

[Ronald J Kimball <rjk@linguist.dartmouth.edu>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 1999 at 11:45:40PM -0400, Richard Gordon wrote:
> At 01:11 +0000 6/17/1999, Richard K. Moore wrote:
> >I'm curious as to why people haven't been advising the use of a hash (or
> >two).  Alan's application seems to be one with only a small amount of data.
> >Is the Schwartzian Transform incredibly faster as a solution for large
> >amounts of data?
> 
> I had essentially the same thought since hashes are very fast and, 
> until earlier today, I had never even heard of a Schwartzian 
> Transform. Efficiency is a splendid thing, but short of making time 
> back up, I don't know how my perl stuff could run much faster than it 
> does now using extremely ordinary hash and array techniques.

Okay, let's see some Perl code that uses hashes to sort an array.  I am
very intrigued by this idea.


> In Solaris, I can execute 21 successive web file maintenance routines 
> on about 180 linked files in 3 directories in less than 40 seconds. 
> The text is maybe 5-6 million characters in the aggregate and many of 
> the routines are not trivial. When cgi's are run later, the return of 
> results appears to be limited by dialup bandwidth more than anything 
> else.

We're not worthy.  We're not worthy.


> For several years, I was MIS director or a payphone company that used 
> FoxPro- one of our programmers made some really nice, elegant stuff 
> that I admired, but her production work was always overcoded and 
> undertested. Another one who was a retired air force fighter pilot 
> took a much more functional approach and made things that worked and 
> showed up on time and roared even if they were largely based on brute 
> force. Who do you guess the guys who sign the checks told me to get 
> rid of?

Does this have a point?  Are you suggesting that you can either write brute
force code that works well, or elegant code that doesn't, but no other
combination?  Hmm...


> Maybe Schwartzian Transform is cool and maybe it isn't, but it 
> doesn't seem likely to put any more money in your pocket in either 
> case.

Maybe you still don't get it.  ;)


Ronald

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