use Perl

• Who cares about the sppeed? (Score:2)

  by autarch (914)

  They are all damn fast, and using any reads much better.
• Your reasoning is flawed (Score:1)

  by Arador (8415)

  Your reasoning is flawed. You are assuming that there is one positive match in the set, and that the set is small. On such a small set you're right any isn't any faster, but superior algorithms rarely show up on small datasets.

  If you would test this with a larger dataset, any would come out much better. On my computer, using the list 1..1000 and a needle of 500, it is in fact faster. The advantage only gets bigger when the haystack gets bigger.

  You're right it's not always better, but it is when it matters t
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Smylers (2592)

    I agree. With such a small set no method is going to take an irritatingly long time. Since you have the program handy could you give it a quick tweak to use a bigger array and re-post the results?

    I also agree with autarch that any reads better, as a way of signalling programmer intent. I'd probably use the any from Perl6::Junction rather than List::MoreUtils; any chance you could add that to your testing as well? Thanks!
• List::Util::first (Score:1)

  by srezic (8057)

  Can you test how good would perform List::Util::first()?
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by bart (450)

    Well, you won't like it... Using the code:

    first => sub { my $x = defined first { $_ eq $search } @letters },

    first is always close to 20% slower than any...

    Search for Z
              Rate    Time first  any
    first  38653/s 25.87us    -- -21%
    any    48955/s 20.43us   27%   --
    
    Search for M
              Rate    Time first  any
    first  49484/s 20.21us    -- -22%
    any    636
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by srezic (8057)

      Your observation seems to be only true for small arrays. In this plot [radzeit.de] you can see how first() gets better with larger arrays.

      In this benchmark [sourceforge.net] grep and first were searching for the middle element in the array.