With a list of letters: 'ABAE?S?' your implementation ran 3.5 times faster than the one from http://blog.vrplumber.com/427 (in 0.437 seconds vs 1.515)
Without wildcards yours runs slightly quicker as well. I guess with the wildcards, using an re as a quick filter against each word, versus the translate method is much faster. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
