[Israel.pm] what do you think is best

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Chanan,

why didn't you reply to the list as I specifically request in my signature, 
and there was also a Reply-to: header to guide you? I'm CCing this to the 
list, because you have not specifically said that you are replying to me in 
private, and I don't see anything private there. I wish GMail.com would burn 
in the eternal fires of hell.

You've also top-posted.

On Thursday 25 November 2010 09:26:14 Chanan Berler wrote:
> Hi Shlomi,
> 
> Thanks for your remarks.
> As for them:
> 
> cunk_size -- oops misspelled, since i wrote the example first hand on
> this email.

So how do you know it works?

> no need for \G or \g since the text is single line only (it's a join
> of array values, seperated with , characters).

Now that I tried it I see that your program behaves as expected:

<<<
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @all_bets = (1..200);
my $chunk_size = 7;
my $bet_txt = join ",", @all_bets;
$bet_txt .= ",";

my $cnt = 0;
my $group;
while (($group) = $bet_txt =~ /((?:\d+,){1,$chunk_size})/o)
{
        print $group . "\n";
        $bet_txt = $';#'
        exit if ($cnt++ == 10);
}
>>>

However, doing $bet_txt = $' is an inefficient way to do it and here's what 
perldoc perlvar is saying about $' :

<<<<
       $'      The string following whatever was matched by the last
               successful pattern match (not counting any matches hidden
               within a BLOCK or eval() enclosed by the current BLOCK).
               (Mnemonic: "'" often follows a quoted string.)  Example:

                   local $_ = 'abcdefghi';
                   /def/;
                   print "$`:$&:$'\n";         # prints abc:def:ghi

               This variable is read-only and dynamically scoped to the
               current BLOCK.

               The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a
               considerable performance penalty on all regular expression
               matches.  See "BUGS".

               See "@-" for a replacement.
>>>>

So you should not use it. Here is a better program using \G and /g:

[perl]

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @all_bets = (1..200);
my $chunk_size = 7;
my $bet_txt = join ",", @all_bets;
$bet_txt .= ",";

my $cnt = 0;
my $group;
while ($bet_txt =~ /\G((?:\d+,){1,$chunk_size})/og)
{
        print $1, "\n";
        exit if ($cnt++ == 10);
}

[/perl]

> 
> my question, is based on performance only, where using index on arrays
> vs. using regular expression for finding the chuck size (X number of
> elements).

A regular expression match is time consuming too.

> I was told, that regarding system resource, when applaying a buffer
> size (for the array string), will cost the system it's memory.

What is an array string?

> while using index based on an array it's less memory "expencive"
> what you think ?

Let's see for ourselves:

[Perl code]

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw(:all :hireswallclock);

my $step_size = 7;

open my $null_fh, ">", "/dev/null";

sub using_splice
{
    my @all_bets = (1..200);

    while (@all_bets)
    {
        print {$null_fh} join( ',', splice(@all_bets, 0, $step_size) ), ",\n";
    }
}

sub using_regex
{
    my @all_bets = (1..200);
    my $bet_txt = join ",", @all_bets;
    $bet_txt .= ",";

    while ($bet_txt =~ /\G((?:\d+,){1,$step_size})/og)
    {
        print {$null_fh} $1, "\n";
    }
}

# using_splice();
# using_regex();

timethese(10_000,
    {
        'using_regex' => \&using_regex,
        'using_splice' => \&using_splice,
    }
);

close($null_fh);

[/Perl code]

This gives me the following results:

Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of using_regex, using_splice...
using_regex: 3.22811 wallclock secs ( 3.14 usr +  0.01 sys =  3.15 CPU) @ 
3174.60/s (n=10000)
using_splice: 2.46572 wallclock secs ( 2.40 usr +  0.01 sys =  2.41 CPU) @ 
4149.38/s (n=10000)

So the array and splice version is faster.

We can also try natatime from List::MoreUtils.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> 
> thanks
> Chanan
> 

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang

<rindolf> She's a hot chick. But she smokes.
<go|dfish> She can smoke as long as she's smokin'.

Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .