From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:info-cpm Newsgroups: fa.info-cpm Title: Fast spelling checker Article-I.D.: ucb.1733 Posted: Tue Aug 10 00:31:51 1982 Received: Thu Aug 12 04:59:58 1982 >From FONER@Mit-Mc Tue Aug 10 00:30:27 1982 Yes, that sounds fair. The worst case for such an algorithm occurs when every word in the input file is unique, which would necessitate essentially a copy of the input file to disk if the file itself is larger than your physical memory (losing all the time because of the necessity to maintain the output sorted alphabetically... even a binary tree would necessitate a lot of head motion, I fear). However this is a worst case, and you could always simply store only what won't fit in memory on disk. Probably you will usually find that you can hold the whole alphabetized list in memory, and thus win. Short files (smaller than physical memory) will always win. Large ones might be profitably split up if the chances of unique words filling memory is high, but this is probably rare... almost any given document will not be using very many \unique/ words unless you are checking a dictionary or Brown's Corpus or something equally inappropriate. Good luck!