== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article > Steven Schveighoffer wrote: > > Through some more work with printf, I have to agree with bearophile, > > this lookup function is horrid. > It is now, but when it was originally written (maybe as long as 20 years ago) > there were only a few strings in the table, and it was fine. It's just > outlived > its design. Clearly, it should now be a hash table. > Just goes to show how useful a profiler is.
Wow, now it's really hit home for me how much programming languages and libraries have advanced in the past 20 years. Nowadays any reasonable person would generally use a hash table even for small N because it's not any harder to code. Any modern language worth its salt comes with one either built in or in the standard lib. I guess 20 years ago this wasn't so.
