Multiway Branching

[Ivan Voras]

rshepard at salmo.appl-ecosys.com wrote:

> inefficient. Since these data are coming from an OMR scanner at 9600 bps (or
> faster if I can reset it programmatically to 38K over the serial cable), I
> want a fast algorithm.

It depends on your actual environment, of course, but 38kbps is usually 
not considered "fast" today - given a modern CPU (or even one from a few 
years back), 21 (or 42) short string comparisons in an interprated 
language should be trivially fast.

(I'm not saying that using a different approach such as dictionaries 
isn't good because of other reasons :) )