in reply to Re^2: memory-efficient hash kind for incremental sort
in thread memory-efficient hash kind for incremental sort

There are only 1 million words in the english language,

Whilst true for some definitions of the term "english word", using just 6 character alpha "ids", 'AAAAAA' .. 'ZZZZZZ' gives 26**6 = 308,915,776 possibilities.

And if the key words are (for example) genomic subsequences, the using just ACGT and 14 character subsequences can result in 268,435,456 possibilities.

That's why I always ask questions when the data examples are so obviously made up. I seriously doubt there are 300 million male first names, even if you take all possible languages into account.

Well, outside of taking native american names into consideration. They seemed to (according to the movies; I've no idea about the reality of the matter), use multiple words for names with no derivation from previous (parental) names. Then again, it's arguably possible that even if you totalled up every native american (those capable of speech) in history, they wouldn't total 300 million?


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