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Agreed proteins as "words" encoded in a 2-bit DNA alphabet surely do get much bigger than even human languages like German. :-)

That said, "galactic algorithms" suggests impracticality/inefficiency "in the small" which is not really true of the Myers bit-vector approach. So, I don't think "only faster for big problems" is a great excuse for the wider world. Myers bit-vector is faster all the time (compared to many other things in far more frequent use in the wild). It's also not that involved. Here is a link to an implementation in about 34 lines of Nim code: https://github.com/c-blake/suggest/blob/master/suggest.nim#L...



Oh no, sorry for the confusion: I wasn't referring to Myers algorithm, you made it clear in your comment that it is generally faster!

That's impressively concise, although I get the feeling that I should read the papers you alleged to earlier to actually grok it :)


Fair enough. IMO, Hyyro's description is easier to follow than Myers' own which may be the real explanation for its relative obscurity.

Re: concision - an incomplete summary of why I like Nim is that it is more concise than Python, as fast as C, and safe, both in its metaprogramming and otherwise.




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