Re: [MacPerl] sorting arrays

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

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.

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.

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?

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.


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto:richard@richardgordon.net
http://www.richardgordon.net
770.565.8267

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