union in Python

[Duncan Booth]

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) wrote in news:bhrsuj$mdv$0 at 216.39.172.122:

> But I don't see any reason why the performances couldn't be made to
> match. 

For searching short strings there probably isn't any advantage to using 
Boyer-Moore, and for short search strings the advantage is probably quite 
small. I think you would need to spend some time working out just where the 
breakpoints are that make it worth switching from a plain search to one 
that skips ahead.

The regular expression search may still win, since regular expressions, 
even if not precompiled, are cached. That means that if you perform the 
regex search millions of times, the setup cost is only incurred once. 
String searches don't have this advantage, and it seems unlikely to be 
worth the effort of caching arguments passed to string.find!

-- 
Duncan Booth                                             duncan at rcp.co.uk
int month(char *p){return(124864/((p[0]+p[1]-p[2]&0x1f)+1)%12)["\5\x8\3"
"\6\7\xb\1\x9\xa\2\0\4"];} // Who said my code was obscure?