Righto!

New numbers:
                 user     system      total        real 
park:         4.875000   0.070312   4.945312 (  4.994253) 
original:    11.375000   0.117188  11.492188 ( 11.549160) 

and this is interesting:

#!/usr/bin/perl                     
use Benchmark;

open(F,"<keys") || die $!;
timethese (1, { 
               perl => q{ 
                 while(<F>) { 
                   chomp; 
                   tr/=/,/; 
                   %h = split(','); 
                 } 
               } 
              } 
          ); 

Benchmark: timing 1 iterations of perl... 
      perl:  6 wallclock secs ( 6.52 usr +  0.10 sys =  6.62 CPU) 

btw, ruby's benchmarking module is spoiling me :-)

-joe


> -----Original Message-----
> From: dave / thomases.com [mailto:dave / thomases.com]
> Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 9:53 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: [ruby-talk:7408] Re: Ruby performance question
> 
> 
> "Joseph McDonald" <joe / vpop.net> writes:
> 
> > def park_readfile 
> >    h = Hash.new 
> >    file = File.new("keys") 
> >    while line = file.gets 
> >      h = Hash[*line.chomp!.tr!('=', ',').split(',')] 
> >      # do stuff here... 
> >      h.clear 
> >    end 
> >  end 
> 
> You could speed this up a bit more... you don't need the h.clear
> anymore, as you're creating the hash fresh each time around.
> 
> Dave
>