Richard Hector (2018-04-05): > >> What if the question is "Find all the English words that have an E > >> in the 5th position and a U in the 7th"? > > Yes, what? Who would ever ask such a question? What is the point of such > > a question? > Solving a crossword puzzle?
This is a good example, thanks, but I think it goes eventually for my point. Words in a crossword puzzle are not generic text. You cannot do them in Chinese, for example, AFAIK. Even in English, if you just have a list of words, you cannot use it directly for crossword puzzles, you first need to filter it to remove the few diacritics that have seeped from other languages, because the "é" in "précising", for example, can be crossed with a normal "e" in any word. Starting from a list in "pure" text, you need to build the data structure that is convenient for the particular problem. And indeed, for crossword puzzles, accessing the n-th letter of a de-diacriticized word is a necessary operation. But it is not accessing the n-th letter of a generic string. Regards, -- Nicolas George
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
