Personally I would say that as long as the intention is find a single element in a list then grep is not the ideal. grep is more useful when you want to find all the elements in a list that match some criteria. Using it to find one element usually means that grep is doing a whole lot more work than is necessary. (It wont stop once its found the element even if it were the first.)

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.