[cb321]

Many of those are very funny. Where would we be without the Chuck Norris joke format?

Of course, paraphrasing @sitkack 's observation in the other comment thread (combining with my idea that streaming alone is faster than all that repeated hashing), "better address space is worse real-time perf". For the guy behind the famous 1986 good natured trash talking "industrial-strength Fabergé egg–..., a museum piece from the start", it made me wonder if between 1980 (when McIlroy1982 was likely written) and 1986 (when the famous Knuth-McIlroy "battle" happened) if Doug came to consider that v7spell was perhaps guilty of the very same "crime" he used to roast Knuth.

In truth, of course, as with most things, it's just a matter of scales - at some small document scale the v7 compression works better while at a closer to dictionary-size scale the merging does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42980934). I suppose it's also worth mentioning that the optimizations of that linked program automagically compresses prefixes and optimizes suffix byte-comparisons in a human language-neutral way (i.e., just from the sorted structure/vague concept, with no linguistic insight beyond "lexicographic" order). Esp. given the i18n push of the 90s, it's possible the POSIX guys might have included some prefix-suffix delta format merge utility had it existed and English-specificity might be what blocked `spell`. Of course, Seymour Cray's computers had already begun vector processing and those techniques might also not be very SIMD-friendly. { So..many..trade-off..dimensions! }