OK, I'll admit - you've got me puzzled. How can a multi-pass operation (in the average case) like sorting be faster than a single traverse of a list - even with a hash lookup thrown in? 

# After writing the data to a file and then timing a ``system "sort -u
+ nums.txt > /dev/null"''
Elapsed time (hash): 0.707023 seconds
Elapsed time (disk sort): 7.108102 seconds

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In reply to Re^2: need for speed - how fast is a hash by oko1
in thread need for speed - how fast is a hash by Anonymous Monk

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